Indian Manufacturers File Anti-dumping duty Proposal on Solar Panel Imports from China to Plug the Gap

The Indian government has already announced that it will impose a 40% duty on solar panels and 25% duty on solar cells from April 2022 to protect and promote its domestic industry. The safeguard duty which the government has imposed on Chinese and SE Asian imports is expected to end in July which means that there will be a nine months’ gap in which there will be no duty on imports. This would mean that Indian developers would massively import and hoard solar cells and panels as prices are expected to jump up sharply in April. This has been the trend seen not only in India but other countries also where massive imports were done before the imposition of the duties. To prevent this kind of hit on their business which is on a major upswing, the Indian solar manufactures association has filed an anti-dumping duty on China, Thailand and Vietnam. The intention is that these nine months are not taken advantage by the Indian developers as well as the foreign manufacturers to massively hoard and store equipment in India before the duty comes into effect.

The Indian solar cell manufacturers have the most to gain as there is very limited capacity of solar cells in India as of now and some of them like Adani and Jupiter Solar have been making massively abnormal profits on the solar cell production ever since the safeguard duties came into effect. Besides the duties, there are other government schemes like KUSUM, SRISTI etc. which don’t allow foreign made solar cells or panels, whatever the price. This has given a large captive market for the incumbent Indian players which they have been generously milking over the last couple of years and intend to do so till new solar cell capacities come up under PLI. The eight-month gap will lead to major losses for them and they intend to plug this gap with a stopgap ADD. Given the government’s strong favor towards domestic manufacturers , don’t be surprised if the ADD proposal is accepted and a new stopgap duty is imposed to stop the surge in solar imports which can be expected.