Shandong's First RCEP Certificate of Origin to ROK Signed and Issued at SCODA

Application-approval-receipt-signing-stamp! At 48 seconds past midnight on the eve of the lunar new year of tiger, at the Customs Certificate of Origin Approval Center at SCODA, Jiaozhou Customs under the jurisdiction of Qingdao Customs took less than one minute to sign and issue the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) Certificate of Origin for a batch of jeans exported to the Republic of Korea by Qingdao Qili Jiarong Garment Co., Ltd. At 24:00 today, the RCEP Agreement officially took effect in the Republic of Korea. This Certificate of Origin became the first RCEP Certificate of Origin to the Republic of Korea.

On New Year's Eve, the head of an enterprise was busied with the production orders rather than New Year’s Eve dishes. Why so dedicated? In addition to the reason that the order represents good fortune in the New Year, the company's general manager Zhang Shijie did the math for the journalist, "With this certificate of origin, upon the goods arriving in South Korea, the customs duty levied will be halved from 13% to 6.5%. Our batch of jeans is worth 170,000 yuan, so we can save more than 10,000 yuan in customs duty when clearing customs in South Korea. The company's export volume to South Korea was more than 22-million-yuan last year, which means we could reduce costs by more than 1.4 million yuan every year."

The certificate of origin obtained by Zhang Shijie is vividly known as the "economic passport" of export goods in international trade. The exporter can enjoy foreign tariff reduction and other preferential treatment with it.

"SCODA and Qingdao Customs jointly built the Certificate of Origin Approval Center to help the enterprises better use the rules of origin, reduce costs, and increase profits," said Xiang Zhiqiang, Member of the Party Working Committee, and Executive Deputy Director of the Administrative Committee of SCODA.

Thanks to the release of RCEP policy dividends, Shandong's import and export trade has grown with tremendous impetus. Since RCEP officially came into effect on January 1, Qingdao Customs has issued RCEP certificates of origin for 4,589 batches of export goods. A total of 1.54 billion yuan of goods have benefited from tariff reduction in their import and export with other RCEP member countries through Qingdao Customs, and the enterprises have received tax concessions of about 16 million yuan.

Zhang Shijie, who thought his business would not do well due to the impact of COVID-19, has benefitted from a series of favorable policies offered by the government in the past two years, which has not only restored his confidence but also made him full of hope for the future of his company. "Thanks to the RCEP tariff reduction, we could save 290,000 yuan in tariff compared to the most preferential tariff rate applied to Asia-Pacific trade agreement previously." Zhang Shijie said that "the company will increase exports to South Korea this year, and the export volume is expected to increase by 10% compared to the same period last year."