"When the government starts collecting money as a tax, they don't normally give it back." — Curtis Spencer, CEO, IMS Worldwide
For most of the last sixty years, the average U.S. tariff rate was two and a half percent. Duty was a rounding error, and import networks got designed accordingly.
Curtis Spencer, CEO of IMS Worldwide, says the floor is now 20 percent, and plenty of importers are still treating that like weather that will pass.
He has spent more than four decades in foreign-trade zones. When he started, the United States had twelve of them. Customs is about to issue number 302.
In this episode of Art of Supply, Kelly Barner and Curtis Spencer discuss:
- Why the business case for an FTZ went from 2- or 3-to-1 to 10-to-1 without the paperwork getting any harder
- What "substantial transformation" means now that customs is chasing country of origin into second- and third-tier suppliers
- The 1 percent of cases where a bonded warehouse beats a zone, and how to tell whether you are in it
Links:
Curtis Spencer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curtis-spencer-0a553010/
Kelly Barner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-barner-6884443/
Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/art-of-supply-6895142546301960193
Art of Supply on AOP: http://www.artofsupply.com
Subscribe to the Art of Procurement Newsletter: https://resources.artofprocurement.com/art-of-procurement-podcast-subscribe
