Cat challenges UK tariffs on Chinese-made excavators in court

Caterpillar (Xuzhou) Ltd’s legal challenge has started at a court in London after the UK Trade Remedies Authority slapped Caterpillar’s Chinese-made excavators with a tariff of 18.81% in 2025.

The TRA launched its investigation into dumping of Chinese excavators (11t-80t) into the UK market in November 2023 in response to an application from UK-based JCB and found that Chinese exporters undercut UK prices by an average rate of 23.4% thanks to reduced production costs.

In May 2025, the UK’s Secretary of State for Business and Trade accepted the TRA’s recommendation to impose new anti-dumping and countervailing measures on imports of excavators from China to the UK.

Caterpillar (Xuzhou) launched a judicial review against the TRA and the Department of Business and Trade’s decision to impose provisional anti-dumping measures on imports of Chinese excavators in February 2025.

When that failed, Caterpillar and LiuGong both made submissions to the TRA in July 2025 asking it to reconsider its anti-dumping measures, with Cat questioning the TRA’s calculation of the individual anti-dumping amount that was calculated for it as the sampled cooperating overseas exporter to the original investigation.

In its final decision to impose anti-dumping duties, the TRA said there were no grounds to vary the tariffs and announced in December 2025 that the anti-dumping measures, including the 18.81% tariff on Cat excavators, would remain in place until May 2030.

Now, in a written submission to the Tax and Chancery Chamber, part of the Upper Tribunal, Cat has said that the tariff is “so high that Caterpillar no longer exports from China to the UK”, according to a report in the Financial Times.

The case is being heard in the court this week by Mr. Justice Richards.

Representing Caterpillar (Xuzhou), barrister Tristan Jones KC, said, “By dramatically inflating Caterpillar’s costs and profits beyond anything actually paid or earned in China, the TRA treated a company charging premium prices for export to the UK as though it was dumping,”

But Philip Moser KC, representing the TRA, dismissed Caterpillar’s challenge as not having “any merit”.

“If steel or electricity prices are artificially low as a result of non-commercial factors (for example, due to government subsidies), that gives rise to a PMS [particular market situation] that will apply across the market,” Moser said in the TRA’s written submission.