TradeLane

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is gaining momentum. If “TPP” isn’t as popular as “lol”, it will be soon. That’s because the TPP is a big deal. We’ll be doing several blogs over the coming months as additional details regarding the Agreement become known so you can stay up to date. 

For now, let’s start with the basics. The original plan of a four-nation pact between Singapore, New Zealand, Chile, and Brunei has grown to be a 12 country partnership impacting 800 million consumers, and now includes the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Peru, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Australia. Together, this makes it the largest regional trade accord in history, with a combined GDP of 28 Trillion USD. To put that into perspective, that is 40% of all Global GDP, 33% of global trade, and accounts for 40% of US Imports and Exports. 

Over the recent holidays, I was having a discussion with my wife regarding how different cultures celebrate and which days are the most important. Being American, my family has always placed a certain emphasis on Christmas Eve. We have dinner together and open one present that evening, while reserving Christmas Day for a leisure breakfast, late lunch, and a trip to the cinema in the afternoon. My wife is Colombian and had a different experience growing up. In Colombia, they do not do a lot to celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve; all of the festivities take place on Christmas Day. Since we recently moved to the UK, we were both looking forward to the emphasis on Boxing Day. 

The European Commission, however, has let us know that they celebrate Christmas on December 29^th and provided the trade industry with the gift of the Union Customs Code, Delegating and Implementing Acts. The Union Customs Code replaces the Community Customs Code with the goal of modernizing processes and regulations to match up to today’s business climate and technology. The Union Customs Code is effective May 1^st, 2016, but implementation is going to be phased over three years. 

Recently I assisted a client with a particularly difficult and rarely used provision of the NAFTA agreement. It involved a tariff shift rule and list of exceptions that, when coupled with a specific production process, became problematic. 

Prior to contacting Tradewin, the client had a Free Trade ‘expert’ look at the provision of NAFTA and the challenge they were facing. The ‘expert’ came to a very detailed and long winded way of creating massive amounts of work for the client. While the analysis was technically correct for the issue, ultimately it did not fit the bill for the client. 

When you’re dealing with something as complicated as a Free Trade agreement you want the quickest, easiest, and most compliant solution. A company needs to have a level of confidence in whoever is performing the task. It’s necessary to know you have the right kind of expert who has actual experience with Free Trade qualification. These issues can and do involve trade secrets, material cost structures, manufacturing process, etc. Companies love “the bottom line” and the faster you get there with the least amount of legal exposure the better.

Contact our Free Trade experts today.

I have had better starts to the New Year. On the first Monday of the year, I don’t know who was tougher to get out of the house and off to school that first day, my wife (a teacher) or my toddler. Already this week, the Stock Market had dropped like a lead balloon, the Middle East was in shambles, China was giving signals of slowing down, North Korea supposedly tested an H-Bomb, and I spilled coffee on the tie I got for Christmas. Let’s hope next week goes much smoother. 

I imagine a lot of people are going to make predictions on Global Trade this year, from volume trends to new Free Trade Agreements, or whether the ACE deployment will be successful. While everyone else is making predictions, I am just going to pay special attention to these five events in 2016: 

As we are wrapping up 2015, we are looking forward to the new year and we bet you are, too.  As a gift, we have combined the most helpful TradeLane blogs of 2015. Sit down, grab a cup of coffee, and refresh yourself on some of the most helpful tips and tricks that we had to offer in 2015.