India reimposes anti-dumping duties of 460 to 681 dollars a tonne on Chinese titanium dioxide for five years, 13 months after the Calcutta High Court struck down the same levy, and the paint industry that won in court has lost on the merits
NEW DELHI, October 26, 2026 – India has reimposed anti-dumping duties on titanium dioxide originating in or exported from China, setting rates of 460 to 681 United States dollars per tonne for five years and closing a 13 month gap created when the Calcutta High Court quashed the previous levy on procedural grounds.
Notification No. 26/2026-Customs (ADD), issued by the Department of Revenue in the Ministry of Finance on October 24 and signed by under secretary Dheeraj Sharma, gives effect to final findings issued by the Directorate General of Trade Remedies on August 3. The duties run for five years from publication in the Official Gazette unless revoked, superseded or amended earlier.
For an industry in which a single imported input accounts for a substantial share of finished product cost, the measure is consequential. Chinese material supplied 57.2 percent of Indian titanium dioxide demand during the period the authority examined, up from 43.1 percent in 2020-21, and Indian domestic capacity in the relevant grade is a small fraction of national consumption. The duty does not replace that supply. It reprices it.
The rate structure
The duties are specific rather than ad valorem, expressed in dollars per metric tonne, which means their protective effect rises as world prices fall and erodes as prices rise.
Five bands apply. The lowest, 460 dollars per tonne, covers LB Xiangyang, LB Sichuan, LB Lufeng, LB Group and Henan Billions Advanced Material. A second band of 510 dollars per tonne covers twelve listed non-sampled cooperative producers. Shandong Jinhai Titanium Resources Technology and Shandong Xianghai Titanium face 563 dollars per tonne. Anhui Gold Star Titanium Dioxide Group and its trading arm face 609 dollars per tonne. Any other Chinese producer faces 681 dollars per tonne, and so does titanium dioxide originating outside China but exported from China, a provision aimed squarely at transshipment.
Against a landed value of roughly 2,466 dollars per tonne during the investigation period, the lowest rate adds about 19 percent to the delivered cost of LB Group material and the residual rate adds close to 28 percent.
The producer specific rates are conditional. They apply only where the commercial invoice carries a dated and signed declaration by a named official of the issuing entity, stating that person’s name and function. Where the declaration is absent or defective, the 681 dollar residual rate applies regardless of who made the goods. That is a familiar design, and it is also where importers most often lose money: the difference between the bottom band and the residual is 221 dollars per tonne, payable because of a signature.
Duty is payable in rupees, with the exchange rate determined under Section 14 of the Customs Act 1962 and the relevant date being the date the bill of entry is presented under Section 46.
What falls outside
The exclusions are extensive and commercially important, because titanium dioxide is used across industries with very different competitive conditions.
Excluded from the measure are grades used as food additives or food colouring; grades used in pharmaceutical tablet film coatings; grades used in skin care products including cosmetics and sunscreens; grades used in textile and fibre applications, including delustering and fibre grade material; rutile grade for decor paper at the fibre or pulp stage; and nano or ultrafine titanium dioxide below 100 nanometres.
One inclusion is worth flagging because it cuts against the pattern. Titanium dioxide used as a pigment for printing on textiles, garments or fabrics is not excluded. The distinction turns on function: material that delusters a fibre is outside, material that prints on a fabric is inside. Importers in textile processing should not assume that a textile end use places a consignment beyond the measure.
The tariff items cited are 2823 00 10, 3206 11 10 and 3206 11 90. As is standard in Indian practice, the classification is indicative only and the product description governs.
The litigation that preceded it
This duty exists for the second time, and the history explains the unusual shape of the current measure.
The Directorate General of Trade Remedies initiated the underlying investigation on March 28, 2024, under case number AD(OI)-03/2024, with a period of investigation running from October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023. Sampling was notified in October 2024, an oral hearing followed, and a disclosure statement issued in January 2025. Final findings recommending duties were issued on February 12, 2025, and the central government imposed the levy by customs notification on May 10, 2025.
The Indian Paint Association challenged it. In a judgment dated September 22, 2025 in writ petition WPO No. 148 of 2025, the Calcutta High Court quashed both the final findings and the imposing notification. The grounds were procedural, concerning the handling of confidentiality and the adequacy of disclosure to interested parties, rather than a finding that no dumping had occurred.
That distinction mattered. A quashing on procedure sends the file back rather than ending it. The authority issued a remand proceeding notification on October 17, 2025, took further comments, held a remand oral hearing in December 2025, issued a disclosure statement in May 2026 with two extensions, and on August 3, 2026 reached the same conclusion it had reached before, recommending duties of 460 to 681 dollars per tonne.
The users won the case and lost the outcome. That is not an unusual result in trade remedy litigation, where procedural defects are curable and the underlying economics rarely change between the first determination and the second.
The gap that will not be closed
Between the High Court’s judgment in September 2025 and the notification of October 24, 2026, no anti-dumping duty applied to Chinese titanium dioxide entering India. The domestic industry asked the authority to backdate the reimposed levy to the date the earlier duty lapsed.
The authority declined, reasoning that a duty can only be imposed when the Ministry of Finance notifies it. The practical effect is that roughly 13 months of imports entered duty free, and the three Indian petitioners, Kerala Minerals and Metals, Travancore Titanium Products and VV Titanium Pigments, absorbed that competition without protection while the remand ran.
For importers, the mirror image applies: material cleared before the gazette date carries no duty, and there will be no retrospective demand. For anyone with cargo in transit, the gazette publication date is the only date that matters, and it has not been separately reported.
The structural problem the duty does not solve
The authority found that Chinese imports reached 226,869 tonnes during the period of investigation and accounted for 57.2 percent of Indian demand, while the domestic industry’s share fell from 13.8 percent to 11.9 percent.
Those two numbers describe the difficulty. Indian capacity for rutile sulphate grade titanium dioxide is roughly 3,500 to 4,000 tonnes against national demand of close to 300,000 tonnes. No level of duty can redirect demand toward domestic supply that does not exist, which means the measure’s principal effect will be to raise the cost of imported pigment rather than to substitute it.
During the remand, user industries argued precisely this: that domestic capacity in sulphate rutile grade is negligible, and that coated sulphate rutile has no domestic equivalent at all. They also sought a ruling that toilet soaps fall within the cosmetics exclusion. The authority declined to address the soap question, holding it outside the scope of the remand, which leaves a classification ambiguity that importers of soap grade pigment will have to manage with their own customs advice.
The authority did determine that rutile sulphate and rutile chloride grades are like articles, a finding that prevents importers from escaping the measure by switching between the two production routes.
Who is affected
The immediate incidence falls on Indian paint and coatings manufacturers, for whom titanium dioxide is typically the single largest raw material cost in a white or light coloured decorative paint. Printing ink, plastics masterbatch and rubber compounding operations are also exposed.
On the export side, LB Group emerges best placed. At 460 dollars per tonne it carries the lowest rate in the schedule and the smallest cost disadvantage, and in a market where Chinese producers compete against each other as much as against Indian mills, a 221 dollar per tonne spread between the bottom band and the residual rate is a decisive commercial advantage. Smaller Chinese producers that did not cooperate, or that export through traders unwilling to issue the required invoice declaration, face the residual rate and will find Indian business difficult to retain.
Other Chinese producers named in the authority’s findings include Pangang Group entities, Jiangxi Tikon, Shandong Doguide and Ningbo Xinfu.
No comment from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on the Indian measure had been issued as of Monday. No Chinese producer has commented publicly. The Indian Paint Association, which brought the successful court challenge, had not issued a fresh statement on the October 24 notification.
The wider pattern
India’s action lands in a month of unusually dense trade remedy activity around titanium dioxide and around Chinese chemical exports generally.
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry initiated its own anti-dumping investigation into rutile titanium dioxide pigments from China on October 16. The European Commission opened an anti-dumping investigation into furfuryl alcohol from China the same day, and China’s Ministry of Commerce opened an anti-dumping investigation into p-nitrotoluene from the European Union on October 3. Beijing has pointed to 28 European trade remedy investigations against Chinese products since 2025, roughly half of them involving chemicals.
The common driver is capacity. Chinese chemical and pigment capacity built for a domestic construction cycle that has slowed is now seeking export markets, and the markets receiving it are responding with the instruments available to them. Titanium dioxide is a clean example: a commodity grade product, straightforward to document, with a concentrated producer base and a well organised downstream user industry in every importing country.
What importers should do
Three steps follow directly from the text of the notification.
First, confirm the invoice declaration. The producer specific rates are unavailable without a dated, signed statement from a named official of the issuing entity giving that person’s name and function. Importers buying through trading houses should establish now whether the declaration will come from the producer or the trader, and whether the form satisfies the notification.
Second, check the gazette date rather than the notification date. The five year term runs from publication, and so does liability. Material cleared before publication is outside the measure.
Third, review grade classification against the exclusion list before, not after, clearance. The exclusions turn on end use and particle size, both of which require documentary support. An importer claiming the cosmetics or pharmaceutical exclusion should expect to evidence it, and an importer of textile printing grade should not assume the textile exclusion applies.
The economics of a specific duty
The choice of a specific duty, expressed in dollars per tonne rather than as a percentage of value, has consequences that will play out over the five year term.
A specific duty is a fixed wedge. When world titanium dioxide prices fall, the duty becomes a larger share of landed cost and the protection tightens. When prices rise, the wedge becomes proportionally smaller and the protection loosens. At the investigation period landed value of roughly 2,466 dollars per tonne, the bands run from about 19 percent to about 28 percent in ad valorem equivalent terms. If pigment prices were to fall by a quarter, those same bands would be equivalent to roughly 25 to 37 percent.
Indian authorities have generally preferred specific duties in commodity chemical cases for exactly this reason: they are harder to erode through declared value manipulation, and they do not require customs officers to litigate transaction values. The trade off is that they lock in a protection level calibrated to a price environment that may not persist.
For importers, the planning implication is that duty per tonne is now a known constant and price is the variable. That is the reverse of the usual position, and it changes how forward contracts should be structured. An importer with a five year horizon can budget the duty line precisely while hedging only the underlying pigment price.
Pass through and the paint market
The question every Indian coatings manufacturer is now modelling is how much of the duty can be passed to customers.
Titanium dioxide is typically the single largest raw material input in white and light coloured decorative paint, commonly cited at a fifth to a third of raw material cost depending on formulation and opacity requirements. A duty adding 19 to 28 percent to the delivered cost of imported pigment therefore translates into a raw material cost increase in the mid single digits for a typical decorative formulation, before any reformulation response.
Indian decorative paint is a consolidated market with a small number of large branded manufacturers and a long tail of regional producers. The large manufacturers have pricing power, established distribution and the balance sheet to absorb a cost increase through a cycle. The regional producers have none of those advantages and buy pigment in smaller lots, often through traders, which also makes them the segment most exposed to the invoice declaration requirement and most likely to pay the 681 dollar residual rate.
The predictable outcome is consolidation pressure at the bottom of the market, which is a common second order effect of input duties and one that rarely features in injury analysis.
Reformulation is the other lever. Extenders such as calcium carbonate, kaolin and precipitated silica can replace some titanium dioxide in lower specification products, and opacity can be partially recovered through resin and binder adjustments. Those substitutions cost performance, and they are more available in low cost segments than in premium ones. Expect formulation changes at the value end and price increases at the premium end.
What this does to the supply chain
Three structural effects follow.
Chinese producers with the lowest rates gain share at the expense of those with the highest. The 221 dollar per tonne spread between the 460 dollar band and the residual is larger than the margin on which most pigment trade is conducted, which means Indian buyers will consolidate purchasing onto the named low rate producers. LB Group entities are the principal beneficiaries, and the effect of an anti-dumping measure will be to concentrate Chinese supply into fewer, larger hands.
Trading intermediaries lose. The invoice declaration requirement rewards direct producer relationships and penalises purchases through traders who cannot or will not provide a producer signed statement. Importers who have historically bought spot through intermediaries will need to restructure or accept the residual rate.
Third country routing becomes attractive and is anticipated. The notification’s extension of the 681 dollar rate to pigment originating outside China but exported from China addresses one form of circumvention. It does not address material of Chinese origin shipped via a third country, which is the harder case and the one Indian authorities have pursued through separate anti-circumvention proceedings in other product lines. Importers considering a routed structure should assume it will be examined.
India’s wider remedy posture
The titanium dioxide measure is not isolated. Indian trade remedy activity against Chinese imports has expanded steadily across chemicals, steel and engineering goods, and the Directorate General of Trade Remedies has run a heavy docket through 2026.
The policy logic is consistent across those cases. India has a growing manufacturing base, a stated industrial policy objective of import substitution in intermediate goods, and a large bilateral goods deficit with China. Trade remedies are the instrument available to a government that has bound its tariffs and does not wish to raise applied rates across the board.
The constraint is the one visible in this case: remedies cannot create capacity. Where domestic production exists at scale, a duty redirects demand. Where it does not, as in sulphate rutile pigment at 3,500 to 4,000 tonnes against 300,000 tonnes of demand, a duty raises costs for domestic users and transfers rent to the exchequer and to the small domestic producers that do exist.
Whether that trade is worth making is a policy judgement rather than a technical one. The authority’s own findings make the terms of it unusually clear.
What to watch
The first question is whether the Indian Paint Association returns to court. The original challenge succeeded on confidentiality and disclosure, and the remand was conducted specifically to cure those defects. A second challenge would need different grounds, and the association has not signalled one.
The second is whether Chinese producers respond with price undertakings or with volume shifts to other Asian markets. Indian duties of this size typically redirect rather than eliminate trade, and the destinations most likely to absorb displaced Chinese pigment are those without their own measures in place. That list is shortening.
The third is the soap question. The authority’s refusal to rule leaves a live classification dispute that will be settled, one way or another, at the customs counter.