​          On November 29, 2019, the Ministry of Industry and Trade issued Circular 37/2019/TT-BCT detailing a number of contents on trade defense measures.

Accordingly, the Investigation Agency shall consider and approve the request for information security provided by the Party concerned in the investigation and application of trade defense remedies for the following five types of information:

- Business secrets related to the nature of a product or manufacturing process;

- Non-public information on production, business and financial activities of an enterprise including: production costs; cost of sales; terms of sale; selling price of each specific transaction, expected transaction, or other offers; information of customers, distributors, suppliers; financial information of the business;

- Information on the dumping margin of each specific enterprise in the anti-dumping investigation case;

- Information on the benefits that the requested Party is entitled to for each subsidy program being investigated or reviewed in the anti-subsidy investigation case, except for the information describing the operation of the program, benefits recorded in documents or publicly posted; the rate of sales-based subsidy calculated for each Requested Party in a program;

- Other information that the Investigation Agency determines that, if disclosed, is likely to cause significant harm to the information provider or to whom the information provider collects information or causes significant influence to the competitive advantage of the information provider. 

In case of refusal of a security request, the Investigation Agency shall notify in writing the reason within 45 days from the date of receipt.

       In addition, the Ministry of Industry and Trade also stipulates 06 types of imported goods to be considered exempt from temporary/official trade defense measures:

- Goods cannot be produced inland;

- Goods with characteristics different from domestically manufactured which cannot be replaced by those domestically produced;

- Goods that are special products of similar goods or directly competitive goods produced domestically;

- Similar goods, directly competitive goods produced domestically shall not be sold on the domestic market under the same normal conditions;

- Similar goods, directly competitive goods produced domestically do not meet the domestic demand;

- Imported goods are included in the total amount of exemption requests prescribed in Clauses 1 to Clause 5, Article 10 for research, development and other non-commercial purposes.

This Circular takes effect from January 15, 2020.

Department of Enterprise Management!