Importing Equipment With No Sale: Customs Value and the IOR
A US IT provider ships eleven company laptops to client employees in Canada. The laptops stay the client’s property, on long-term loan for several years. Nothing is sold. The client does not want to register with the customs authority, and that is the entire reason they are looking for help. Importing equipment with no sale […]
How to Compare DDP Quotes: 11 Things the Price Does Not Tell You
Two suppliers quote DDP into the same country, and you now have to compare DDP quotes that look like the same job. Same equipment, same destination, same week. One is meaningfully cheaper, and the obvious question is why. The short version. Two DDP quotes differ because sellers make different, unstated assumptions about what the price […]
WEEE Producer Obligations: When the Importer Becomes the Producer
CE marking asks whether a product meets the applicable EU product requirements. WEEE asks a different question entirely: who is responsible for its end-of-life obligations. And the answer, more often than importers expect, is you. The word doing the damage is “producer”. In ordinary usage it means the company that made the thing. Under the […]
CE Marking Importer Obligations: What You Are Responsible For
Most explanations of CE marking are written for manufacturers. That is understandable, since the manufacturer does the engineering work and signs the declaration. It is also why CE marking importer obligations are so often misunderstood, and why so many importers arrive at the subject believing their part is simply to check the mark is there. […]
NBTC vs TISI: Which Thai Approval Your IT Equipment Actually Needs
A rack-mounted server with no wireless may need one Thai product approval. Add a wireless management module and the regulatory route can change entirely. Ship equipment that will later be re-exported and a separate trade-control question can arise. The hardware barely changes. The path to market does. The NBTC vs TISI question gets asked constantly, […]
Import VAT and the Importer of Record: Who Can Reclaim It?
If you ship IT hardware at volume, you already have people who handle import VAT. A finance team, a tax adviser, a recovery process that works. This article is not about doing their job. It is about the thing that sits upstream of them and quietly decides whether their process can work at all: how […]
Customs Enforcement Executive Order 2026: New IOR Bond and Vetting Rules for US Importers
If you import into the United States, one date matters more than the one being talked about. Since 18 September 2026, CBP may void an importer of record number where the information on CBP Form 5106 is inaccurate or incomplete. That enforcement is already running, and it started before any of the headline changes in […]
Your First Shipment Into a New Country Will Not Go Smoothly
Nobody tells you this at the start, so we will. Your first shipment into a new country will probably not go smoothly. Not because your team is careless, and not because you picked a difficult market. Because a first entry is a genuinely different exercise from every entry that follows it, and most import plans […]
Decommissioned, Not Free to Ship: Exporting Retired AI Hardware
The cluster is decommissioned. The buyer is agreed, the racks are ready to come out, and the shipment cannot lawfully leave the country. Not because anything was done wrong, but because two questions were never asked: is this hardware still controlled, and is your company even eligible to act as the exporter? Both answers surprise […]
EU Battery Regulation for Importers: EPR, Labels and 2027 Passport
If you import battery energy storage, industrial batteries, or hardware with batteries built in, the shipment now has to clear more than customs. The EU Battery Regulation attaches a set of product-compliance and producer duties to those goods, and several of them fall on the importer, not only the overseas manufacturer. The trap is treating […]