The Weekly Trade Briefing

On 1 September the US Department of Commerce opened a country-wide circumvention inquiry into certain alkyl phosphate esters — chemicals finished in Thailand using intermediate materials produced in China.

The question Commerce is asking is whether moving the final stage of production to a third country changes where the goods legally come from, or whether the existing antidumping and countervailing duty orders on Chinese esters still apply.

Nothing has been decided. An inquiry has been opened, not concluded. No company has been found to be circumventing anything, and it would be wrong to read the initiation as a finding.

But the inquiry exists at all because of a distinction that catches more businesses than any other in international trade: where goods are shipped from, and where they legally originate, are two entirely different things. Duty is charged on the second one.

It is rarely deliberate. A supplier changes. An invoice names one country. The goods were finished somewhere else, from materials made somewhere else again. Nobody checks — until a customs authority does it for them, and by then the exposure is retrospective.

Three things worth knowing, whichever market you sell into:

• "Assembled in" is not the same as "originating in." Origin turns on what was done to the goods, not on the last address they passed through.
• A change of shipping country changes nothing on its own. Routing goods through a third country does not give them that country's origin.
• A trade agreement existing is not the same as your goods qualifying for it. Preference has its own product-specific rules and its own evidence requirements.

If you cannot show where your goods originate and prove it with evidence, you do not yet know your duty rate — you know your supplier's shipping address.

Source: US Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration, Certain Alkyl Phosphate Esters From the People's Republic of China: Initiation of Circumvention Inquiry on the Antidumping and Countervailing Duty Orders, Federal Register 2026-17796, published 1 September 2026, dockets A-570-168 and C-570-169.