Kodak is the last remaining domestic producer of aluminium litho printing plates in the States.
The manufacturer has petitioned the US Department of Commerce and the US International Trade Commission to request relief from “unfairly traded imports”.
In a letter to customers seen by Printweek, Kodak chairman and CEO Jim Continenza said: “Kodak is committed to high quality products, reliable supply, and sustainable domestic manufacturing. Our competitors have taken a different approach: importing plates from China and Japan and selling them at unfairly low prices. It is not a level playing field.
“This surge in unfairly traded imports from China and Japan threatens our ability to continue manufacturing plates in the United States, causing serious harm to our company, our employees, and our valued customers,” Continenza stated.
“We did not take this step lightly, and we determined that this was a necessary action to restore fairness in pricing so we can preserve American manufacturing jobs and our sustainable manufacturing processes here in the United States while continuing to serve our valued customers.”
If Kodak is successful, it would mean duties on plates from Chinese and Japanese suppliers would be levied “in the coming months”.
Kodak filed its petition at the end of last month. It named a raft of plate manufacturers and distributors in its filing, and stated that Fujifilm’s Suzhou plant in China in China was the biggest exporter of plates to the US.
Fujifilm closed its US plate plant in South Carolina last year. Agfa had already shut its New Jersey plant prior to that.
Additionally, ECO3 (Agfa’s former Offset business) was cited as the second-largest Chinese plate exporter to the US, with Lucky Huaguang Graphics in third spot.
In a twist to the back story, in 2019 Kodak sold its own Chinese plate plant to State-owned Lucky, in a partnership deal that gave Lucky access to Kodak’s platemaking know-how.
Fujifilm is also the largest Japanese exporter of plates to the US, from its Kanagawa plant.
Kodak’s petition stated that anti-dumping duties implemented in Brazil and Korea (on Chinese plates), and India (on Chinese and Japanese plates) had resulted in “significant incentive for subject producers to target their exports of lithographic plates towards the large and open US market absent trade relief”.
While Kodak’s action is specific to the US, change is also afoot in the European market. Fujifilm has already announced plans to shut its Tilburg plate manufacturing facility in the Netherlands by the end of this year, which means plates for its European customers will be imported from Japan and/or China in the future.
