Export Chocolate to China

Finding the HS number

We want to export chocolate from Belgium to China, but we do not export a product from a country to another. Indeed we rather export an HS number. That is why we first search for the HS number on Market Access Database.

We followed this link: http://madb.europa.eu/mkaccdb2/datasetPreviewFormATpubli.htm?datacat_id=AT&from=publi ; and find the product code 1806.90 which matches the best with the product we want to export to China.

Finding the Coface rating

The second step is to find the Coface rating for China. This rating estimates both the country and the environment of the business.

We followed this link:

http://www.coface.fr/CofacePortal/FR_fr_FR/pages/home/os/risks_home/risques_pays

So, China is ranked A3 as a country and B for the business climate, which is encouraging to export there.

Finding the duty measures

We checked in the lists of countries and Belgium belongs to the most favorite nations as exporting food preparations containing cocoa to China. This means that taxes are low for this product.

Indeed, tariffs are only 8%. But there is and additional tax : Value Added Tax which is 17% of duty paid value.

Exporter’s guide to import formalities

Here is the list of documents to product in order to export our product to China.

We attribute a grade between 1 and 4 to each document according to the difficulty to provide the document, as 4 is the highest level of difficulty. Then we get a code for the operation. Here is a “31.10232” operation.