The General Administration of Customs has introduced 16 measures to further optimize the port business environment and facilitate enterprise customs clearance

Customs General Administration Holds Media Briefing on 16 Measures to Further Optimize Port Business Environment and Facilitate Enterprise Customs Clearance(Reprinted from: Customs Release)

On December 5th, the Customs General Administration (GAC) held a media briefing where Lin Shaobin, Deputy Director of the Comprehensive Business Department, introduced the "16 Measures to Further Optimize the Port Business Environment and Facilitate Enterprise Customs Clearance" .

Lin Shaobin addressed the attendees, expressing gratitude for their continuous concern and support for the customs work. He then proceeded to brief on the newly introduced measures aimed at addressing the focal points, blockages, and pain points that are currently of common concern to foreign trade enterprises, within the scope of customs responsibilities .

This year, under the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee and the State Council, China's foreign trade has maintained a good momentum of quality improvement and stable quantity. On November 8th, the State Council's executive meeting reviewed and approved the "Several Policy Measures to Promote the Stable Growth of Foreign Trade". Recently, these policy measures have been published. The GAC resolutely implements the decision-making and deployment of the Party Central Committee and the State Council, focusing on "policy reinforcement and service enhancement". While ensuring the implementation of various existing stable foreign trade policy measures, the GAC has promptly studied and introduced new policy measures to help enterprises relieve difficulties and increase the quantity of policies, stimulating market entity vitality and stabilizing expectations and boosting confidence .

To enhance the precision and value of policy measures, the GAC conducted research on the implementation of stable foreign trade policy measures and listened to the opinions and suggestions of foreign trade enterprises, further "asking enterprises for needs and plans". On this basis, the GAC introduced the "16 Measures to Further Optimize the Port Business Environment and Facilitate Enterprise Customs Clearance", focusing on the current focus, blockages, and pain points of foreign trade enterprises, and proposing corresponding support measures within the scope of customs responsibilities. In terms of content, the 16 measures can be summarized as "four focuses" :

1. Focusing on cultivating new drivers of foreign trade to expand the increment. These measures mainly support the development of new forms and models, such as expanding the pilot scope of cross-border e-commerce retail exports and cross-border e-commerce retail imports under the bonded retail import model across customs districts; fully promoting the electronic guarantee of cross-border e-commerce taxes. At the same time, promoting the development of new forms such as bonded maintenance, bonded remanufacturing, and bonded fuel supply, such as supporting the expansion of "two ends outside" bonded maintenance pilots outside the comprehensive bonded zones and free trade pilot zones .

2. Focusing on foreign trade optimization to stabilize the stock. In terms of optimization, the focus is on ensuring the import of energy and mineral products and agricultural and food products. For example, continuing to deepen the inspection model reform of energy resource commodities, steadily expanding the destination inspection range of imported mineral products; promoting the admission process of meat, aquatic products, dairy products, and other livelihood products. In terms of export optimization, the main focus is to further facilitate the export of automobiles and promote the export expansion of local characteristic agricultural and food products .

3. Focusing on reducing costs and improving efficiency to activate vitality. For example, promoting the upgrade of benefits for advanced certified enterprises, strengthening the implementation of customs "Authorized Economic Operator" (AEO) enterprise convenience measures, and continuously enhancing the sense of gain for AEO enterprises; building a China Customs preferential origin service platform to help enterprises improve the utilization level of free trade agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP); implementing preferential import tax policies for major technical equipment to support the import of advanced technical equipment .

4. Focusing on facilitating cross-border trade to improve efficiency. The 16 measures include optimizing customs clearance processes and improving cross-border logistics efficiency. For example, carrying out the reform and optimization of the customs clearance model for imported goods, deeply promoting the application of the railway rapid customs clearance model, accelerating the optimization of the "combined port" business model, expanding the scope and scale of application of "departure confirmation," and supporting qualified ports to carry out "linked unloading"; deepening the reform of the "remote local inspection" and "batch inspection" supervision models for imported and exported goods, continuously expanding the scope of pilot products for "remote local inspection" and improving inspection efficiency. At the same time, accelerating the construction of smart ports and deepening the construction of the International Trade "Single Window" cross-border trade one-stop comprehensive service platform to continuously improve the level of cross-border trade facilitation .

Lin Shaobin emphasized that the introduction of these measures aims to make port customs clearance faster and more convenient for businesses, helping the majority of foreign trade enterprises to reduce costs and increase vitality.