The local manufacturing of the polyester filament yarn (PFY) in Pakistan is continuously being damaged due to the import dumping by China and Malaysia.
Import dumping is a practice which is targeted to damage the pricing of a product. It occurs when manufacturers export a product to another country at a price below the normal price. This results in damaging the sales of the locally manufactured products.
As a result, eight out of 12 local producers (companies) of PFY, have shut down their business so far while only four producers are hardly operating in the country. The domestic manufacturing industry had recently made large investments for its capacity expansion as well, which may go to waste if anti-dumping regulations are not implemented strictly by the government. The raw material of PFY is also produced locally in Pakistan, which would mean that PFY industry expansion will also promote the upstream domestic industry in Pakistan.
The importers/ traders file a petition for stay on anti-dumping duties every few months and have been evading the duties till now.
It is pertinent to mention that six other PFY producing countries (including Vietnam, Turkey, Mexico, USA) have also levied anti-dumping duties against the Chinese PFY suppliers while 2 other countries including Bangladesh are protecting their local PFY industry by duties as high as 20% or through ban on imports by traders.
A classic example of anti-dumping duties is from 2016 when the US imposed 522% combined anti-dumping and countervailing import duties on certain steel imported from China because China was dumping steel into the US market keeping prices unfairly low.
