On January 1, 2022, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement will come into effect. The "Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement" (RCEP) is a free trade agreement with the largest population, largest economic and trade scale, and the greatest development potential in the world. It is bringing tangible benefits to regional economic and trade development. RCEP currently has 15 member countries. In the first quarter of this year, my country’s imports and exports to the other 14 RCEP member countries totaled 3.08 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 7.3%, accounting for 31.2% of my country’s total foreign trade value during the same period, and the proportion increased by 0.8% compared with the same period last year. . How should foreign trade enterprises grasp the opportunities brought by RCEP?
Certificate of origin is available in 15 countries, reducing tariffs is good for trade
On January 1, 2022, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) officially came into effect, including China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and ten ASEAN countries. As the free trade agreement with the largest population and the largest economic and trade scale today, the area covered by RCEP is one of the power sources of the global manufacturing industry, accounting for nearly 50% of global manufacturing output, 50% of automobile production, and 70% of electronic product production. %.
Lamps are one of the export advantage products of Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, with annual exports exceeding 10 billion yuan. More than 98% of the lamps produced by one of the companies are exported to Australia, New Zealand and other places. They will start to adopt the RCEP agreement after April 2022.
This lamp company has been using the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement in the past to export lamps to Australia with zero tariffs. However, when Australian traders resell lamps to Southeast Asia, there is a 30% tariff threshold because there is no free trade agreement between the two parties.
Zhou Meiping, customs director of a lighting company in Guangdong: In the past, when Australian companies sold products to Vietnam or South Korea, Vietnamese and Korean customers could not enjoy tariff relief.
After adopting the RCEP agreement, Australian traders can not only enjoy zero tariffs when importing, but also enjoy zero tariffs when products are sold to other RCEP signatories with the back-to-back certificate of origin issued locally. Orders and market expansion have provided great help.
Cheng Wenhui, Operations Director of a lighting company in Guangdong: Recently, we have sold some orders from Australia to Vietnam. The total sales of such orders are 4.37 million yuan. When the RCEP certificate of origin is issued locally, and these products are sold to Vietnam, import tariffs of 1.31 million yuan can be reduced or exempted.
The certificate of origin is the "economic nationality" of the exported goods, and is an important basis and certificate for the goods to enjoy the tariff reduction or exemption of the importing country. A plastic product company in Zhongshan was approved as an RCEP-approved exporter in March this year, and since then they can issue their own certificates of origin.
Liu Hang, deputy director of the Tariff Department of Gongbei Customs: The advantage of becoming an approved exporter is that the company can issue a statement of origin by itself, instead of going to a visa agency to issue a certificate of origin.
Printing the declaration of origin independently not only saves real money, but more importantly, it can be printed at any time 365 days a year, which greatly improves the delivery efficiency.
Liu Hang, deputy director of the Tariff Department of Gongbei Customs: The approved exporter system is one of the contents of the RCEP agreement, which is binding on all parties to the agreement. RCEP is a relatively high-standard free trade agreement. It does take some time and effort to study and research the rules of origin and tariff reduction policies. But as long as enterprises really use it, they will find that the previous efforts are worthwhile.