Exporting to Expand Sales

If you have a website to sell your products or services, you have the potential to reach markets beyond your immediate borders!

One of the best ways to begin is to take a look at the Export Assessment at export.gov. Many of these questions will guide you into areas of the export.gov website where you can obtain more information on exporting. You will receive a score once you complete the assessment, which will help you to assess your export readiness, as well as an identification of areas your business needs to strengthen to improve its export activities.

Business Development Managers help companies smooth their entry into worldwide markets with value-added services, including:

  • Preparing marketing plans for international markets
  • Handling export operations
  • Providing international market research
  • Identifying best market prospects
  • Advising on finance and insurance options
  • Working to find customers and partners

U.S. Export Assistance Center

The US Department of Commerce Commercial Service has a network of export and industry specialists located in more than 100 U.S. cities and over 80 countries worldwide. These trade professionals provide counseling and a variety of products and services to assist small and midsized U.S. businesses export their products and services.

New Bedford Foreign Trade Zone

New Bedford is a designated Foreign Trade Zone grantee. This means it can sponsor applicable companies and developers to realize unique financial benefits specifically offered to Foreign Trade Zones. These benefits include, but are not limited to:

Duty Deferral: A firm can move its current inventory of domestic or duty-paid merchandise into a Zone (or may develop a Zone around its existing facilities) and duty is paid on imported material only after it has remained in the Zone during its normal inventory cycle (versus paying duties once it arrives in the U.S. before it is delivered to the site.)

Imported items may be held in a foreign trade zone indefinitely, without paying U.S. Customs duties.

Duty Elimination: Tariffs are never paid on goods that are exported from the FTZ. Unlike a drawback program which refunds previously paid tariffs, Zones allow a company to avoid payment altogether.

Goods may be destroyed in the FTZ, and all tariffs do not have to be paid, and waste or scraps are never assessed any duty.

Duty Reduction (a.k.a. Inverted Tariffs): Unique to manufacturing operations, imported components that undergo a “substantial transformation” into a final product with a different Customs classification for duty assessment, may benefit from inverted tariffs. The inverted tariff occurs on a final product that would have had a lower duty rate if it had been imported as a finished product, rather than the duty rate that is assessed on all its imported components separately. For example, the final product is manufactured from the imported components within the FTZ, and then, entry is made on the final product into the U.S. Duty is assessed at the finished-product rate, but only applies to the foreign component of that finished product. Duties are never paid on U.S. value-added. If some components have duty rates lower than the rate of the final product, the importer may “fix” those rates at their current levels.

Activities: In a Foreign Trade Zone, merchandise may be assembled, relabeled, manipulated, manufactured, mixed, stored, salvaged, processed, tested, cleaned and/or sampled.

Company activities must meet qualification standards set by 15 CFR Part 400 and the U.S. Customs regulations.

Application for FTZ status must be made to the federal Foreign Trade Zones Board.

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