Introduction Importing a Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) vehicle into Great Britain is absolutely achievable when you approach it as a single, joined-up process. You will prepare a compliant customs declaration, determine whether you can lawfully claim preferential duty under the UK–Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), calculate duty and VAT on a correct customs value, [...]
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For more than four decades the UK’s trade story was framed by the European Union. The 2016 referendum and the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) that took effect in January 2021 fundamentally changed the trading environment, while the pandemic and the 2022 global energy shock reshaped prices, supply chains and partner choices. Between 2017 and [...]
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Introduction Importing a passenger car from Germany to the United Kingdom can offer real value—access to wider specifications, better pricing, and rare models—provided the import is managed with the same precision you would apply to a regulated financial transaction. Since the UK’s exit from the EU, Germany-to-GB movements are now international imports governed by customs [...]
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Introduction: Trade’s paper problem meets its digital moment For decades, international trade has been powered by world-class logistics—and slowed by nineteenth-century paperwork. Title documents, letters of credit, certificates and invoices shuttle between banks, carriers, forwarders and authorities, often copied, couriered and rekeyed multiple times. The result is delay, cost, fraud exposure and barriers for smaller [...]
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Executive summary European customs administrations are under contradictory pressures: stop more fraud and unsafe goods, but release compliant consignments faster. For two decades, the Union Customs Code (UCC) and the EU Customs Risk Management Framework (CRMF) leaned heavily on rules-based targeting. That era isn’t over—but it is being augmented by machine learning (ML) and advanced [...]
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Introduction UK Freeports are designed to catalyse trade, investment, and jobs by combining two powerful bundles of incentives within mapped areas: (1) tax reliefs inside designated Freeport special tax sites and (2) customs and excise facilitations inside designated Freeport customs sites (also called “free zones”). The two site types can be co-located, and businesses may [...]
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Introduction — Why high-tech trade matters more than ever “High-tech” is not a monolith; it is a basket of R&D-intensive industries—electronics and telecommunications equipment, computers and office machines, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, scientific instruments, precision and medical devices, and more. These are the sectors that embed design, IP and advanced manufacturing in their cost base, and they [...]
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Introduction Handcrafted goods—textiles, ceramics, carved wood, metalwork, baskets, jewellery, decorative glass, and artisan homeware—enjoy resilient demand in the United Kingdom. Their appeal lies in cultural provenance, design authenticity, and sustainable narratives that mass production rarely matches. Bringing handicrafts to market, however, requires diligence across three domains: accurate tariff classification and origin treatment; precise computation of [...]
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