General

At the beginning of the Spring Festival in Yantai Port, Shandong Province, the sea breeze is still cool. A car ro-ro ship "Amsterdam" docked at the dock is waiting, and commercial vehicles are orderly driving into its huge cargo hold. After the ship is fully loaded, under the on-site supervision of Yantai Customs, these 4696 international transit commodity vehicles will be exported to the international market by cargo ship. As an important international transit hub for commercial vehicles in Northeast Asia, Yantai Port's convenient and efficient customs clearance environment has constantly attracted many automobile enterprises to handle international trade export business.

In 2022, Yantai Area of the Shandong Pilot Free Trade Zone was approved as the first export supervision warehouse for automobile export distribution in Shandong Province. Yantai Customs comprehensively applied such facilitation measures as "declaration in advance", "direct loading at the port" and "shipping while loading" to help international trade vehicle enterprises solve the problems of tight port storage space and high storage costs caused by the rapid growth of export business, and create an optimal customs clearance environment for the export of commercial vehicles.

"Since the opening of the export supervision warehouse, we have accumulated more than 30000 finished vehicles, saving millions of yuan only in the port storage fee. Now, our finished vehicle export scale has increased from 17000 vehicles per year to 124000 vehicles in 2022, and the export volume in 2022 has increased by more than 40% compared with the same period in 2021." said Sun Yanmei, director of the logistics department of SAIC General Dongyue Automobile Co., Ltd., one of the beneficiary enterprises.

This is only a microcosm of the rapid development of international trade promoted by Yantai Free Trade Zone through institutional innovation. Improving efficiency, reducing costs and improving the environment have always been three important directions for Yantai to improve the level of "cross-border trade" business environment.

Over the past three years after being approved, Yantai District has given full play to the overlapping advantages of China-South Korea (Yantai) Industrial Park, Comprehensive Bonded Zone, Import Trade Promotion and Innovation Demonstration Zone, and Cross-border E-commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zone, focusing on the whole process of international trade, linking the advantages of customs, seaports, airports, etc., and solving the problem with the systematic and integrated reform and innovation of the Pilot Free Trade Zone, to continue to promote cross-border trade facilitation. At present, 36 institutional innovation cases at or above the provincial level have been launched in the field of cross-border trade, of which 12 have been replicated and promoted in the province, and 4 have been innovatively filed by the General Administration of Customs. The trade facilitation index has ranked among the top 3 in the fifth batch of free trade pilot zones in China for two consecutive years, and the evaluation score has risen continuously for three years.

In recent years, the business model of enterprise groups has become increasingly obvious, and the management of "import, export, transfer, storage and sales" in the supply chain has also expanded from a single enterprise to multiple enterprises within the group and between the group and external cooperative enterprises. However, under the influence of the three-year epidemic situation, the import cycle of raw materials of enterprises has been prolonged, and the production has been stagnated due to the shortage of raw materials for a time, which is plagued by the failure to deliver orders on time.

To this end, with the strong support of Yantai Customs, Yantai District pioneered the "bonded supervision mode of enterprise group processing trade", and pressed the "acceleration key" for the flow of processing trade materials. The subsidiaries within the group can enjoy many conveniences such as free transfer and circulation of bonded goods, breaking the barrier that bonded materials and parts could not be transferred between enterprises in the past, and the production and operation efficiency has been improved by more than 20%. At the same time, processing trade enterprises with good production and operation conditions are encouraged to apply for customs AEO certification, comprehensively reduce the institutional transaction costs of enterprises, and help enterprises enjoy more customs clearance convenience in international trade.

At present, Yantai has piloted the independent storage of goods, the circulation of bonded materials and parts, the outward processing, the exchange of bonded materials and parts and other businesses. In 2022, the first "global maintenance" business of game consoles in the province will be launched. With the continuous rise of new types of processing trade, LCD, integrated circuit, marine engineering equipment, biological medicine and other high-end industries have blossomed in many places, and the innovation and upgrading of processing trade has injected new energy into the stability and quality of foreign trade.