As of April 27th, 2022, the General Court of the European Union has moved to annul the anti-dumping and countervailing duties imposed on e-bikes manufactured by Giant Electric Vehicle Kunshan(GEV).

A huge thanks to the lawyers with Van Bael & Bellis who assisted Giant in the case against the duties and were able to prove a methodological error on price comparisons, enabling the manufacturer of Giant’s Chinese electric bikes to call into question the European Commission’s legal structure for the duties.

This has led the General Court to annul the contested regulations in so far as they concern GEV, thereby scrapping the 20.7% anti-dumping and 3.9% countervailing duties applicable to imports of e-bikes from GEV. The General Court found that the price undercutting calculation carried out by the Commission in the context of the anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigations was vitiated by a methodological error because the price of the Union producers included certain elements, namely SG&A and profits of their related selling entities, which were not included in the price of GEV used by the Commission. This error has led to unfair price comparison and was liable to call into question the legality of the contested regulations by invalidating the Commission’s entire causation analysis.

In 2017, a complaint was submitted by the European Bicycle Manufacturers Association on protection against “dumped imports” from non-members of the European Union. This later led to an investigation of alleged benefits Chinese electric bike importers enjoyed and subsequently tariffs came into force. As part of this investigation, the Commission carried out site visits at numerous companies, including Giant’s premises, noting that it believed the firm enjoyed some preferential tax treatments in China.

By July of 2018 provisional anti-dumping duties on imports of electric bikes from China came to pass. At the time there was a considerable debate as to the methodology used to prove injury to European electric bike manufacturers.