Temporary Imports for Industrial Processing

This regime has sought to reduce the costs of  imported inputs to be used in manufacturing industries that add local value to goods which are then exported to other countries.

The regime already regulated a series of steps to transfer temporarily imported inputs to third parties. It is now specified that this operation must be authorized before the goods are processed. Therefore, the transferee (as a follow-on beneficiary) must process these goods, obtain the corresponding Typification Certificate and then export the final goods to comply with the regime.

The recent modifications also relaxed the possibility of transferring goods that have already undergone an industrial process under this regime to another local manufacturer set forth in Decree No. 1622/2007. This second manufacturer was allowed to use the transferred goods for further processing and then export the final products, but it is now also able to transform the transferred inputs for their own industrial processing.

The opportunity to enjoy the benefits of this regime while obtaining the Typification Certificates was also relaxed. The new regulation delegates the authority to set the standards of the Preliminary Technical Report required for performing the temporary imports to the Secretariat of Commerce. This agency will regulate the formalities of these reports and is also in charge of validating the authorized entities that may issue them.

An additional charge was set for those cases in which the temporarily imported goods are processed and then exported for a longer term than the standard 360-day term, provided that this extension was specially granted by the authority. The additional charge set is levied until it reaches a certain proportion of the raw materials import valuation.

These changes also include a specific provision related to the export incentives calculation base. Now, when the export value of the processed goods is lower than the import valuation of the inputs due to market fluctuations, the exporter may use the locally added value to calculate the export incentive base. This provision seeks to strengthen the main objective of this regime: to promote local manufacturing industrial activity.

We understand that these amendments will receive positive feedback from the industrial manufacturers that are benefitted by the temporary import regime.