TradeLane

As I sat along the streets of Hanoi one winter morning in January, observing the patrons at surrounding tables over a bowl of phở, I couldn’t help but notice a familiar sight. From the fragrant yellow teas in Vietnam to the thick sweet milk varieties of Bangkok and Jakarta, same same – to borrow a popular Thai catchphrase, communal tea drinking seems to be the common thread binding 600 million inhabitants who call Southeast Asia (“SEA”) home.

Staying abreast of the customs and trade regulatory changes in Asia can be a challenge from many aspects:

For most retailers, the focus on trade compliance is usually on store merchandise. Most overlook the fact that the compliance of visual merchandise (furniture, lighting, store décor, etc.) is just as important if they are imported from overseas and the company/brand acts as the importer-of-record to those goods.

The dynamics of trade are changing.

Perhaps this is nothing new, trade has always evolved and changed, but I think we would be hard pressed to find an instance in modern peacetime when trade has been asked to adapt so quickly. TPP, Brexit, NAFTA, and steel tariffs, which would have been the biggest stories just months ago, are now muffled background noise to the rhetoric of a Trade War between two of the world’s most important economies.

China Customs has been steadily making changes to the Customs Declaration Form (CDF) in order to better capture the data they believe is important to compliance enforcement and trade policy. This is the fourth major change to the CDF, which was announced in June and went into effect on August 1, 2018.