Ok, so now you have received a quotation from this Chinese supplier you selected.

Next step: calculate how this quote will convert into a successful, aggressive selling price that will help you win your client!

Import costing can be dangerous, as slight mistakes can have a disastrous impact on your margin, and you could end up running your import operation at your own costs…

So here are 5 tips on how to properly cost an import project:

1. Get your product purchasing cost (PPC) straight

You must make sure of what is and what isn’t included in the price you got from your supplier.

The first, obvious verification is to ensure that the price actually corresponds, point by point, to your product as specified: make sure that no option is left un-covered and that the quotation is really all-inclusive. Classic mistakes here are: not checking that the packaging or labelling are included, or that additional expenses will be needed such as mould setup.

Another important point to agree upon with your supplier is the incoterm included in the quotation. Are you supposed to take property of the goods right from the factory (ex-works pricing), or once the products are loaded onto the boat (FOB pricing)? This obviously greatly impacts your costs – be careful, as a lot of different terms can be used.

2. Calculate your freight cost

Here you will need to get quotations from Freight Forwarders. The first thing is for you to decide what freight mode you need. The 3 main options are: sea freight (cheapest, longest mode), air freight (most expensive, quickest mode) and sea & air (a mix of both, less used). Consider your shipment volume and weight as well: air freight can be cost-efficient if you have low quantities or very light products.

Once decided on the freight mode, make sure you get the origin and destination addresses correct; most forwarders are able to quote based on a region and not necessarily a specific city.

Ask for quotations, and make sure to check all the details; here as well, it is important to check that everything is included. Freight forwarders have to include in their quotation the basic freight cost as well as a number of taxes and fixed charges incurred when dealing with international logistics. You may also ask forwarders to include insurance in the quotation.

3. Estimate duties

This is where is becomes tricky. Importing products is subject to custom duties levied by the country where you plan to ship your goods. To get the applicable duty, you need to know what category your products fall in, under the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS codes). Your Forwarder can help, your local custom bureau can help, and online services such as AsiaCalculator can help as well.

From one product category to the other, even for very similar products, duties may vary from 0 to 10% of the imported cost!

Remember that Custom duties apply to the total value of your imported goods as they enter the territory (e.g.: purchasing cost + freight + insurance).

4. Be sure to include all costs

Make sure you don’t forget to include any side cost into your landed cost calculation. Side costs may come from the quality control and testing you will need to implement, the specific logistic operations that will happen once the goods land at destination (ex: palletizing, storage…) or additional costs incurred at the source for your product manufacturing (design, moulding…).

5. Add up your margin

Once you have a proper and accurate sum of all your costs, it is time to make money! Add up your sales margin, and get your selling price.

It is wise to add up an extra few percent to your margin, to cover up for unexpected events such as currency exchange fluctuation, or raw material costs rise.

This is also why it is strongly advised to set a validity date to your sales quotation – 30 days is usually enough.

China’s official Xinhua news agency announced yesterday the execution of Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of its State Food and Drug Administration, in an attempt to show the country’s seriousness about cleaning up obvious problems with exporting contaminated food and drugs.
Xiaoyu was convicted of accepting bribes totaling the equivalent of one million USD to approve untested drugs. The Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court carried out the sentence after denying appeals from Xiaoyu, who argued the punishment was too harsh for the crime, and that he had confessed to his wrongdoings. Evidently, it wasn’t enough. Xiaoyu was the first ministerial-level official executed in China in seven years, and only the fourth within the past thirty.
The execution is expected to be met with mixed reviews by the American public, which has been outraged by China’s continuous problems with contaminated food and drugs. Numerous industries — from major retail chains, to the health insurance and health care industries — have been trying to contain serious health and safety risks from the products. Hundreds of human and animal lives have been affected in the U.S. alone.
But putting an individual to death for accepting bribes also is riling up human rights’ activists, many of whom argue that, no matter one’s stance on the effectiveness of the death penalty, it should not be considered for nonviolent crimes. China’s reputation for violating human rights, after all, is no better than its reputation for exporting dangerously contaminated goods.
The nationwide contamination earlier this year of some of the U.S.’s top pet food brands by wheat protein imported from China was only the latest in a series of scandals involving compromised products from the country, including tires, children’s toys, vitamins used for baby formula, and toothpaste. Even phony anti-malarial drugs have been exported and used, killing or further sickening desperately ill patients.
Texas understands this issue well. With so many products legally and illegally imported from the border, and with only 1% of all of the nation’s imports being inspected by the Food and Drug Administration, it’s likely that nearly any establishment in the state selling almost any goods — from Dallas, to Houston, to Austin, to the tiny border towns — is making available a product American regulatory industries would never allow to be produced in the U.S. Even fruit is subject to different regulations in Mexico, and is often sprayed with chemicals now banned in this country. The problems with Chinese imports, then, which circulate throughout every state, only adds to the problem, and Texans have been shown to be less than tolerant about products on the market that could put public health at risk.
China knows America’s outrage, and is making overt efforts to reassure the Western public of its commitment to safety, including the conviction and execution of Xiaoyu. Without its exports, the Chinese economy would collapse. Wal-Mart alone is China’s eighth largest trading partner, and over 90% of the vitamin C sold in the U.S. is produced there. In fact, Americans would be surprised to know that much of their aspirin, pain relievers, and antibiotics, including penicillin, are produced in China. Labels stating a vitamin or drug’s country of origin are not required in the U.S., however, and few products actually reveal it. Fewer Americans probably even think about it when picking up a prescription from the pharmacy.
This is certainly not to say that all products from China are dangerous, or even of poor quality. It’s the fact we simply don’t know that makes us cringe. We don’t know which exports are safe or, at times, even when we’re buying imported products, let alone imported drugs from a facility in China that may or may not be clean, and that may or may not be producing untested products. Xiaoyu’s willingness to accept bribes to approve untested drugs forces most of us to count our blessings that we weren’t one of the many malaria patients trusting phony medication, or one of the many beloved pets ingesting contaminated wheat protein. Perhaps this will be a turning point for China’s regulatory industry. Perhaps. But until then: buyer beware.
Making sure the products you buy are safe is one very important part of taking care of your health. How you take care of yourself will certainly affect you as you age, and eventually your wallet, as well.

EARLY EACH morning the Chinese traders come to Kamwala market, a sprawling maze of shops, stalls and alleyways in the heart of the Zambian capital, Lusaka. They arrive before everybody else to open shutters, arrange the merchandise and then hand over to the Zambians they have employed as shopkeepers.

There’s a good reason why they don’t serve customers themselves. Two years ago supporters of Michael Sata, an opposition leader who had unsuccessfully run for president with a campaign criticising China’s growing push into Zambia, targeted Chinese-owned businesses in Kamwala during post-election rioting.

Chinese traders at the market have been harassed and abused in recent years. Nowadays, most of the Chinese names above shop doors have been painted over or replaced and Zambians man the tills until their Chinese bosses come to shut up shop.

Sitting behind the counter at one Chinese-owned business, Nelson gestures at the piles of blankets, sports shoes, T-shirts and nylon bags for sale. “Everything here comes from China,” he says. “That’s why it’s so cheap.” Nelson has no shortage of customers eager for bargains to stretch their limited budgets.

Around the corner, Susan Kalal is not so lucky. She sells clothing produced in South Africa and says the Chinese have lured away her customers with their cut-price goods. “Business has been very slow since they moved in. The Chinese sell everything so cheaply, it’s impossible for me to compete.” A few stalls away, another Zambian trader selling jeans made in South Africa sniffs that Chinese imports are of inferior quality. “People buy them and then they fall apart after one wear,” he says. “That’s hardly value for money.”

In Zimbabwe, disgruntled consumers coined a derisive phrase – zhing zhong – to describe such products and the expression appears to have spread to several other African countries where markets are piled high with cheap electronics, clothes, toys and other goods imported from China. But the issue goes deeper than complaints of shoddy workmanship.

When it comes to Africa’s tilt towards Beijing, several of the continent’s commentators have argued that while the winners are the countries that export the raw materials China so desperately needs to fire its economy, the losers are those who face competition from the cheap manufactured goods that result.

“Chinese investors are extremely interested in Africa as a market,” says Lucy Corkin, projects director at the Centre for Chinese Studies at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, the only African institute devoted entirely to researching China’s engagement with the continent. “They realise the potential of Africa as a consumer market to a far greater degree than the West has.”

In Malawi, the most recent African country to sever ties with Taiwan in order to secure a multi-million dollar investment deal with Beijing, some fear that fledgling industries may suffer if China floods local markets with imports. The landlocked nation has few natural resources but over 10 million potential consumers.

“The Chinese talk of a win-win situation, but how can it be when one party is a major economic and geopolitical player and the other is a tiny country like Malawi? Malawian products can never compete against the might of China,” says Ephraim Munthali, a journalist in the capital, Lilongwe.

“When it comes to production, it is difficult for Africa to compete with China,” notes a report entitled China’s Economic Takeoff: Implications for Africa, published by the Brenthurst Foundation, a South African think-tank.

Despite low wages, the report argues, “the continent’s disadvantages, such as poor infrastructure and high transport costs” make African products prohibitively expensive.

Ironically, in Zambia, a textile factory built with Chinese cash as a sign of Sino-Zambian solidarity has been hit by competition from subsidised Chinese imports. The Zambia-China Mulungushi Textiles firm was once the biggest such mill in Zambia, employing over 1,000 people. Last year, the factory ceased production after suffering repeated losses.

“Just like some sectors will win, you are obviously going to have some sectors that are hurt. There is absolutely no way you are going to protect all sectors in this globalised world,” says Zambia’s minister for trade and commerce Felix Mutati.

Concern has been raised about the impact of cheap Chinese imports on clothing and footwear industries following job losses in countries including South Africa, Kenya, Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. Tanzania’s only flip-flop factory is struggling to break even in the face of increasing competition from China. In South Africa, the government imposed a quota on Chinese imports to protect local industry after trade unions cried foul.

Moeletsi Mbeki, deputy chairman of the South African Institute of International Affairs, says China represents both “a tantalising opportunity and a terrifying threat”.

The story is all too familiar, he notes. “We sell them raw materials and they sell us manufactured goods with a predictable result – an unfavourable trade balance.”

Writing in Nigeria’s Daily Trust newspaper, columnist Charles Onunaiju observed that unless efforts are made to alter the current pattern of trade, the Sino-African relationship will “come to resemble the Europe/America and Africa relations, that is, lopsided, dependent and even detrimental to Africa”.

Such criticism has not gone unnoticed in Beijing. During an eight-nation tour of the continent last year, Chinese president Hu Jintao promised to increase imports from Africa. “China takes seriously the concerns about the imbalance in the structure in China-Africa trade,” Hu told an audience in Pretoria, going on to pledge “effective steps” to address concerns.

That July, China removed import tariffs on 454 goods from the 26 least-developed countries in Africa. Since then some $450 million (€306 million) worth of duty-free imports, including sesame, coffee beans, animal hides, cocoa and other products have flowed into the Chinese market from Africa.

“The favourable tariffs are expected to cover more categories according to market demand,” Wei Jianguo, China’s deputy minister of commerce has stated.

But many say this is not enough, arguing that the durability of the relationship between the world’s most populous country and its poorest continent will depend on whether China encourages African efforts to progress from being mere producers of raw materials to becoming authors of their own development through economic diversification.

Last September, Calestous Juma, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, made this point in Kenya’s Business Daily.

“The worst that China can do is to continue Africa’s mineral and plantation economies. China needs to complement its raw material imports with serious efforts that help African countries become exporters of finished goods to the Chinese market,” he wrote. “Failure to do so will reinforce the perception that China’s involvement in Africa will undercut the continent’s efforts to increase its participation in the global economy.”

This series has been supported with a grant from the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund, which is sponsored by Irish Aid. Series concluded.

You might not accept the fact that Chinese goods are the cheapest in the world, but the fact remains that they have succeeded in flooding the entire world with their products. Go to any local store or pay a visit to the super market and you will find that most of the products on sale in there are made in China. A look at their prices will make your jaw drop. You will wonder to yourself as to how can these goods be sold for such low rates. This is not the end of the story. The owners of these malls and shops are also including their profit into the sale price.

So you can imagine the prices at which these wholesale wedding dresses and wholesale watch cell phones are being imported for? However not everyone has got the time and the capabilities to import good from a Chinese wholesaler. This is where you can step into the picture and make a tidy profit for yourself. The economic recession might have created many financial problems for you, but here is the doorway to financial freedom. Now you can finally do whatever you had always wanted to do in life. Stay like a king with the earnings you can make by importing and selling wholesale cheapest electronics only from China.

Get into the act today before someone else beats you to it. The first person who jumps into the fray runs away with the biggest share of the pie. Check out the website of the Chinese wholesaler today and see for yourself the low prices at which goods are available over there. Compare these prices with those at your local store and you will understand the amount of profit you can make by selling them. For the best and cheapest deals in the world, nobody can beat the Chinese wholesaler.

If you are looking for more information regarding Wholesale Shopping then feel free to visit http://www.wholesale-shopping.com/

Trading is not just a simple exchange of goods at a predetermined rate. Many businessmen look at it as a blessing and are thankful for being able to trade on the global markets. They generally keep up to date with current market trends as well as the trends of the past.
The idea of trade is by no means a modern one, people have been trading with goods since prehistoric days. Although the prehistoric man had no means of valuation like we have currency today, they succeeded to trade using systems such as the barter system. Studies of history tell us that these systems of trade did exist in the days of old, and what we have today is the final result of that system.
There are hard evidences found that support the fact that flint was traded for obsidian in the stone ages. When shipping came to the scene, it saw the rise of long distance trades such as in the 3rd century BC with Sumerians of Mesopotamia trading with the Harappan civilization of the Indian Indus Valley.
Trade flourished around the fifth century in Greece and Rome, and its effects were seen once spices were imported from China to Europe. That only goes to prove that trading has been around for much longer than what we imagine at times.
Our markets of today are quite the same in the sense that we exchange one commodity for another with the inclusion of the currency rate. At any given time there is an investor who is crying over his loss while another at the other end is overjoyed at the money he has made. Like any other game, the game of trade also declares a loser and a winner with every deal.
One of the factors that can be critical in your dealings is the tool you use to trade with.
If you are an experienced trader you probably already use a trading platform. It is a vital tool that helps you with market analysis.
Some of the features of trading platforms
1. You can see live market prices of your assets. This means you can immediately tell even the slightest change in the prices, and make crucial decisions when they matter the most.
2. The graph tools that come with the software help you make your own market analysis sheets.
3. You will probably get daily or weekly reports from the broker that you have got the platform from.
We need to thank our predecessors who have initiated the use of trading platforms with their foresight. Today, the Internet has made it possible for one to buy and sell stocks from the comfort of their homes and offices, and this is one of the greatest aspects of Forex trading online.

China-Investment-Center.com offers many advanced world class technical solutions based out of Singapore, but our solutions are good in China and anywhere in the world. Investments result in new technologies and the practical advanced products made from them. We do not offer anything high risk as typical investments do. We do not offer the same solutions to crowds of people, but only to you individually. You do not have to compete against hordes of others playing the same frenzied game of chance that only a very few win and most lose. We offer you a unique technology product that removes most of the risk of investing. With normal prudence you should be able to compete against very minimal competition because you have the best technology and the best products anywhere. By keeping prices reasonable you should be able to gain market share over those with outdated technology products. You can essentially control the game instead of being controlled by it. Of course if you want a very ordinary product line, we can develop that too. However, we work only with a very limited number of clients to develop special technologies for them, and we prefer to develop advanced investment technologies. China-Investment-Center.com is run by a very experienced and practical American scientist who has developed a broad range of diverse technologies and the commercially viable products made from them for numerous American and international companies. We are very experienced in all type investments, including product development, start ups, and product launches as well as every phase of manufacturing. If you would like the next big winner in any particular field, or to discuss what we have, please feel free to contact us. Every investment project is an individual and proprietary effort. We believe you are important. We make it easy to work with us.

For more details, check out www.China-Investment-Center.com

The fines were announced on Friday by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), representing the third highest fine in the agency’s history.

In August and September 2007, the toys from China were pulled from shelves in after testing discovered that they broke the U.S. legal limit on the amount of lead allowed in paint. Many of the toys were from lines of popular characters such as Barbie and Go Diego Go.

The recalls came at a high point of consumer concern over products being shipped from China. In March of that year, contaminated pet food imported from China was found to contain melamine, which was linked to as many as 3,600 pet deaths.

Public outrage following the toy recall led to Congress increasing fines for lead paint violations, stricter bans on the use of lead, and strengthening the CPSC’s ability to enforce regulations with additional funding and manpower.

“These highly publicized toy recalls helped spur Congressional action last year to strengthen CPSC and make even stricter the ban on lead paint on toys,” CPSC Acting Chairman Thomas Moore said in a statement released by the agency June 5, 2009. “This penalty should serve notice to toy makers that CPSC is committed to the safety of children, to reducing their exposure to lead, and to the implementation of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.”

Restrictions were placed on lead levels in household paint and other consumer products due to the risk of lead paint poisoning, especially in young children where elevated lead blood levels can result in permanent brain damage, seizures, growth and mental retardation and other neurological disorders.

Mattel imported up to 900,000 toys with lead paint levels that violated the federal ban between September 2006 and August 2007. Among the Mattel toys recalled were the “Sarge” car from the movie Cars and numerous Barbie accessory toys.

Fisher-Price imported up to 1.1 million toys with high lead levels between July 2006 and August 2007, including licensed character toys, the Bongo Band, GEOTRAX locomotive and a Go Diego Go Rescue Boat toys.

The toys violated the federal ban restricting lead in paint and surface coatings to under 0.06%. Mattel and Fisher-Price agreed to pay the fine, but deny that they knowingly imported the toys.

Health is very important to Children. Which kind of toy is suitable for them? Click here. Healthy toys are for you.