The threat of a lobby to represent the interests of chip users (CI No 954) seems to have had the desired effect, and the American Electronics Association and the Semiconductor Industry Association have turned their attention to user concerns for the first time since the US-Japan semiconductor trade agreement was mooted. They have proposed to the US Commerce Department a hideously complicated series of modifications to the foreign market value procedures contained in the agreement. The two bodies now recommend that where there is no US production of a product, and where no US company has firm plans to undertake production of a like product, neither antidumping duties nor fair market values should be applicable; to avoid an artifically high fair market value during the initial sales period of a new generation of product when yields are traditionally low, the fair price would not be issued for the first six months, as long as there was no evidence of dumping; after the six months, fair market values would be issued in a regular basis; to encourage increased memory chip production, if a company decides to add a production line to an already existing product line, it could use cost-accounting rules to defer certain start-up costs for six months, provided costs are recouped over an appropriate period when production levels are higher; fair market value verification timing would be extended to six-month intervals when dumping is not considered likely; and to ensure that users have full opportunity to input decisions that might affect them, complaints alleging dumping of products now on the monitoring list would be handled via a regular expedited dumping procedure.
