China NDRC Warns Industrial Producers Over Below-Cost Disorderly Competition

The choice of individual production cost as the default benchmark, with industry average cost adjusted downward only as a fallback, matters more than the warning itself: it sets a measurable threshold for what counts as below-cost, which is harder to dispute than a general anti-dumping posture. This reaches producers across key industrial goods, not just the sectors most associated with price wars, and it hands two agencies a shared enforcement role. Whether cost investigations actually follow the admonishments is the open question; the accounting methodology, not the warning, is where the teeth would be.