The Ministry of Commerce introduces five trade facilitation measures to reduce the burden on enterprises

On July 15, the Ministry of Commerce held a regular press conference. Ministry of Commerce spokesperson Shen Danyang said that several opinions from the General Office of the State Council on supporting the stable growth of foreign trade have been issued for more than two months. The Ministry of Commerce has done a lot of work in the past two months and has introduced five trade facilitation measures to effectively reduce the burden on enterprises. This document contains a lot of work that is not only the work of the Ministry of Commerce, but also involves various departments of the State Council, and the Ministry of Commerce plays a coordinating and promoting role. In terms of the Ministry of Commerce’s own work, it has mainly taken measures in five aspects:
First, further reduce the types of goods subject to automatic import permission. On June 10, the Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs jointly issued an announcement that starting from July 1, the automatic classification of 81 commodity codes for five major categories of products, including optical disc production equipment, automotive products, engineering machinery, textile machinery, and metal processing machine tools, will be cancelled. Import licenses were reduced by 14%. In 2013, 6,781 automatic import licenses were issued for the above-mentioned goods, with an import volume of US$2.98 billion, involving 2,253 companies.
The second is to decentralize the approval authority for second and subsequent extensions of tariff quota management of agricultural product processing trade. On June 23, the Ministry of Commerce issued a notice devolving the approval authority for second and subsequent extensions of processing trade of agricultural products (grain, sugar, cotton, wool tops) subject to tariff quota management from the Ministry of Commerce to the provincial commerce authorities where the enterprises are located. In 2013, the Ministry of Commerce handled about 50 such extensions. After the decentralization of approval authority, the approval time has been shortened from the original average of 10 working days to less than 3 working days, saving enterprises processing time.
Third, the “Textile Certificate of Origin Fee” charge item is cancelled. On June 19, the General Office of the Ministry of Commerce issued a notice announcing that it would stop collecting “textile certificate of origin fees.” This charge is the last remaining license charge from the Ministry of Commerce. It involves my export of Turkish textiles, and about 1,000 certificates are issued every year. So far, all Ministry of Commerce license fee items have been cancelled.
The fourth is to reduce the value-added service fees of processing trade network enterprises. On June 26, the China International E-Commerce Center under the Ministry of Commerce notified local representative offices to comprehensively improve service quality and further reduce service fees starting from July 1, and lower the service fees for the 25,000 processing trade networked enterprises they serve. Value-added service fees will be reduced by a minimum of 8%, a maximum of 75%, and an average of 30%. At the same time, it actively supports the gradient transfer of processing trade to the west and provides free value-added services to processing trade network enterprises in four western provinces and regions, including Tibet, Gansu, Qinghai, and Ningxia. After this adjustment, the value-added service fees of member companies will be reduced by approximately 40 million yuan per year.
Fifth, the booth fee for the export exhibition of the 116th Canton Fair will be reduced. In order to reduce the burden on foreign trade enterprises and tide over the difficulties together with the majority of enterprises, the 116th Canton Fair Export Exhibition will reduce the booth fee standard. The booth fee will be reduced by 2,000 yuan for each booth in area C of the exhibition hall, and the booth fee will be reduced by 1,000 yuan for each booth in areas A and B. Yuan. Calculated based on the booth data of the 115th Canton Fair, the total fee reduction was more than 70 million yuan.