Appeal over copier duties

Date: 29/02/1996

A SMALL group of European photocopier manufacturers are filing an appeal with the Court of First Instance against a decision last October to scale down the application of anti-dumping duties on Japanese products.

The regulation imposing definitive duties on so-called 'plain-paper copiers' from Japan will be effective for two years rather than the normal five-year period.

“Now that we have the regulation we are not satisfied. The manufacturers are unhappy that it was shortened to two years,” said a spokesman for the ad hoc Committee of European Copier Manufacturers (CECOM).

The complaint looks set to reopen wounds in an already highly controversial ten-year-old case.

Back in 1986, manufacturers including Océ Nederland BV, Olivetti-Canon Industriale SpA and Rank Xerox Ltd complained to the Commission that these copiers - which use plain instead of coated paper and an enclosed optical system - were being dumped on the Union market at injurious prices.

The Japanese exporters include Canon, Konica, Ricoh and Toshiba and the inquiry also covered 33 related importers in the EU.

Duties were imposed from February 1987, but when a notice of expiry of the measures was published in August 1991, CECOM returned to the Commission with a request for their extension.

A year later, the lobby also asked for a widening of the scope of the duties to include models that could copy at a speed faster than 75 copies per minute. A new investigation was launched, in August 1992, into trading activities in 1991-92. This found that between 1988 and 1992, the volume of imports from Japan fell by 16&percent; and Japanese exporters' market share by 38&percent;, partly as a result of the duties and partly caused by the rise in the value of the yen.

But it also found that Japanese exports to the EU accounted for 26&percent; of the Union market, including an increasing number of larger plain-paper copiers and a recurrence of dumping.

Nevertheless, the case has been fraught with difficulties of which the length of application of the duties was the least contentious.

Even defining a Union photocopier industry for the purpose of establishing injury was no easy task. Of the original complainants, one, Germany's Develop, was acquired by a Japanese exporter and even the remaining companies, Océ and Olivetti, continued to import part of their range of plain-paper copiers from Japan for several years.

A two-year application period was proposed because, by the time the definitive measures had been agreed, the investigation was more than three years old and the original duties nearly ten years old. It was only by restricting the period to two years that the Commission was able to secure a narrow simple majority victory.

Some member states were particularly unhappy that the original measures had been extended to the new style of high-speed copiers. “This annoyed us because that is where the big business is now,” said a diplomat from one of the traditionally 'liberal' member states.