China's 2013 Import Duty-Exemption Catalogue Update: Packaging and Printing Machinery Entries Both Affected

China's Ministry of Finance, the National Development and Reform Commission, the General Administration of Customs and the State Administration of Taxation have jointly issued the Catalogue of Imported Commodities Not Eligible for Tax Exemption under Domestic Investment Projects (2012 Adjustment), referred to below as the Catalogue, and the revised version took effect on January 1 this year. Serving as the primary reference for administering tariff exemptions on imported equipment, each revision of the Catalogue directly reshapes the import costs that manufacturers have to absorb.

In terms of scale, the updated Catalogue keeps 944 entries, and 454 of them — close to 48% of the total — were touched by this round of changes. That breaks down into 130 newly added entries and 11 deleted or merged ones, alongside 87 tariff codes that were realigned, 62 equipment names that were altered and 227 technical specifications that were modified.

Ahead of the revision, the four ministries gathered opinions from regions, government departments, industries and enterprises, and assessed them in light of how domestic technological capability and production capacity have shifted in recent years. Three principles shaped the outcome: continuing to support enterprises that bring in advanced technology and equipment unavailable domestically, so as to drive industrial upgrading and technological progress; providing enterprises with a fair and reasonable external environment for buying domestically made equipment on equal terms, thereby promoting the sound development of the equipment manufacturing industry; and effectively accommodating the needs of upstream and downstream industries as well as equipment builders and end users.

The newly added entries fall into two groups. The first comprises major technical equipment that had already been returned to taxation under dedicated policies, such as large railway maintenance machinery and natural gas pipeline transportation equipment. The second comprises equipment that domestic manufacturers are now capable of producing at a performance level sufficient for national needs, together with equipment for which considerable domestic manufacturing capacity is expected to take shape within a short period — special airport ground equipment, packaging machinery, marine equipment and solar cell production equipment are all included here.

On the technical specification front, the bar for duty-free import was raised for equipment in fields where domestic technology has achieved breakthrough progress in recent years, covering CNC machine tools, stamping equipment, electronic instruments, printing machinery, environmental protection machinery, food processing equipment, metallurgical machinery and power generation equipment. In the opposite direction, the threshold was lowered for items that domestic production still cannot deliver to requirement, including special nuclear power equipment, passenger vehicle molds and pharmaceutical production equipment. Certain entries also saw their names and tariff codes revised, chiefly to adapt to the new tariff schedule and to make daily operations easier for administrative departments, customs declaration enterprises and taxpayers.

Issuing the new Catalogue is one of the concrete measures for implementing the spirit of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and this year's Central Economic Work Conference. It will further strengthen coordination among tax, trade and industrial policies, give fuller play to the supporting role of imports in economic restructuring, and help advance enterprises' capacity for independent innovation, the development of strategic emerging industries, and industrial transformation and upgrading.

— This article is reposted from China Packaging Network (pack.cn). Original link: http://news.pack.cn/show-361986.html