US President Biden to end temporary duty-free period for Vietnam’s solar power items

U.S. President Joe Biden will end temporary duty-free tariffs on solar power items from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, starting next month.

The White House made the announcement in its Thursday release, titled “Biden-⁠Harris Administration takes action to strengthen American solar manufacturing and protect manufacturers and workers from China’s unfair trade practices.”

“President Biden initiated a temporary, 24-month bridge [in June 2022] to facilitate certain imports from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam duty-free to ensure robust deployment while the domestic solar manufacturing base ramped up,” the White House noted.

Per this commitment, the temporary support will end on June 6.

“Producers in Southeast Asia that have been found to be circumventing anti-dumping and countervailing duties on solar manufacturers from the China will be subject to those duties,” the White House announcement added.

President Biden’s Investing in America agenda has catalyzed an American clean energy manufacturing and deployment boom, it said.

However, “as solar manufacturing has made a comeback in the U.S. thanks to President Biden’s leadership, China has further ramped up solar overcapacity, dumping artificially cheap modules and components onto the global market and circumventing trade enforcement measures in an attempt to put other countries’ manufacturers out of business,” the White House clarified.

In December 2022, a U.S. trade court ruled that four Chinese companies had illegally tried to dodge American tariffs on solar products sent from China by routing their products through factories in Southeast Asia. The decision applied to the Thailand operations of Canadian Solar and Trina Solar, as well as BYD Cambodia and Vina Solar Vietnam, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

In April, Vietnam-based Boviet Solar Technology Co. Ltd. (Boviet Solar) said it would invest $294 million in a photovoltaics (PV) factory in Pitt County, North Carolina, the United States.

Boviet Solar said the project, featuring two phases, will be Boviet Solar’s first U.S. manufacturing facility and the second globally, following its successful track record of PV cell and module production in Vietnam.

The facility is expected to have an output of 2 GW of solar panels and 2 GW of PV cells annually. The official opening and mass production of the factory is scheduled for the first quarter of 2025.

Meanwhile, First Solar, an American manufacturer of solar panels, is seeking Vietnamese authorities' nod to enlarge the capacity of its VND23.9 trillion ($942.5 million) factory in Ho Chi Minh City. The firm aims to increase the factory’s annual output of solar photovoltaic modules from 7.3 million to 9.13 million items.