Customs and Trade
Common Issues
Companies in China often encounter the following issues relating to customs:
- Entry time varies significantly sometimes. It is often affected by some very minor mistakes in tariff classification or customs valuation or affected by customs audits which are selected on a random basis.
- Although China generally follows the WTO principles on customs valuation, there are some different local interpretations, e.g., on royalties. It creates some difficulties to replicate the existing contractual models in WTO countries directly to China.
- There are still many grey areas in the PRC customs rules, e.g., in lease importations, which leads to difficult to implement some well developed business/financial models in the western world.
- Importation of used equipments is difficult.
- The rules of origin is much more complex today.
- Lack of ownership on customs function. Usually, customs is a matter that everyone (logistics, legal, tax, finance) cares but no one owns.
Our Services
Duties and Taxes Planning
We help you to reduce your duty cost through effective import and export taxes planning, utilizing special vehicles (trading companies, bonded warehouses), in-country expense allocation, special contractual arrangement, etc.
Valuation Services
The Chinese tariff rates have been decreasing gradually these years and the tariff collection target is increasing every year. The Customs tends to strengthening the valuations of imported goods. We can assist in ruling request on valuations and obtain advanced valuation rulings with the customs.
Classification
With the development of technology, there are more and more goods which are new to the Customs. We can assist to analyze the functions of the goods and apply for a favorable classification through "pre-classification". In many cases, this can help to reduce the duty rate and increase the entry efficiency.
Supply Chain Management
We help you to establish tax and duty efficient supply chains by utilizing the trade agreements China has entered into as well as help you implement planning techniques like "first country for export" which can minimize your sourcing related costs from China.
Health check
We help you to review your customs process, bench mark with best practices and identify and qualify major risk areas as well as develop solutions and improvement plans on the issues we identified. On the other side, we help you to identify tax and customs planning opportunities and follow-through to realize the saving.
Risk Management
We help you to understand the Chinese customs' various criteria on risk management and help you to improve your current process to increase the internal grading with the in-charge customs. The benefit will be the increased entry speed and the significantly lowered chance for being selected as an auditing target.
Customs Audit Defense
Communications plays an important role in the successful closure of a customs audit. Our professionals, who have the professional knowledge as well as the ability to speak the language of multinational companies as well as the government, are able to provide on-time support for you in a customs audit.
