GRK wins Tariff fight

After a five-year fight with the federal government, a local company will stay in Thunder Bay.

As of midnight Thursday, GRK Fasterners will no longer be subject to "anti-dumping" duties on their products. GRK, which manufactures more than 350 types of screws and has 40 employees in the city, would have been forced to move or sell its company to another country had the ruling not gone in their favour.

"Yesterday we found out that apparently we’re not dumping any product in Canada and that we never have been dumping any product in Canada, which means that Canadian government has been unfairly collecting excess duties over the last five years," said company president Mirco Walther.

In 2004, GRK Fasteners’ competitors accused Chinese fastener manufacturers of dumping – selling a product in a foreign country for less than the cost of producing it.

Some of GRK’s product is manufactured in Taiwan, which was added to the list of countries accused of dumping by the Canadian government to appease the Chinese government, said Walther.

A 10 per cent anti-dumping duty was added to some of GRK’s products. With only 24-hours notice given to the company, the duty ballooned to 170 per cent last February.

"Essentially it priced us out of the market in Canada entirely," Walther said. "The retail price jumped from $5 to $13. So you can imagine that is impossible to comprehend for average users of our products."

Walther said the new duty primarily impacted new sales for the company. Sales figures lost by GRK in the last year are close to seven figures because of the increase, he added.

For five years the company has been fighting the dumping accusations, but Walther said the conflict really started to heat up when the tariff was increased. In November, Walther spent a week in Ottawa with the Canadian International Trade Tribunal and faced a whole day on the stand.

The company believes it has a shot at recouping the duties from the government but the legal fees, which have been higher than any revenue lost to duties, are gone. He said the legal fees have soared over $400,000 over the last five years.

Now that the fight is over, company executive director Uli Walther said the sky is the limit for GRK Fasteners in 2010.