From whiskey to hangars: imports aimed at saving 6 billion dollars

The government has its eye on a range of imports ranging from whiskeys to hangers. All these categories will be reached in the next few hours by checks from which up to now they were exempt. There are also restrictions on the purchase of foreign services (such as software, consulting, insurance and transportation, among others). The goal, in any case, is to stop the flight of dollars and the deterioration of the trade balance.

The operations under observation represent a total of 6,000 million dollars in the rest of the year according to estimates by the Ministry of Economy, the equivalent of what the state imports in energy in three months. Since the Executive cannot tighten that tap, it has now aimed its guns at consumer goods that are not manufactured in the country and services. Such savings would allow him to ease the pressure on reserves and redirect dollars to “priority” sectors.

To this end, the Secretary of Commerce, led by Matías Tombolini, will switch 34 tariff positions from automatic to non-automatic licensing. This means that importers will have a delay of up to 60 days if they get approval, instead of 72 hours, and quotas, which are generally granted arbitrarily. With the changes, they estimate they could avoid an outflow of $ 800 million over the rest of the year.

The Ministry of Economy is concerned about the impact of the exchange rate gap. With a parallel dollar close to $ 300, importers trade and take advantage of the demand for dollars at the official value for an amount greater than necessary. What we want is to limit the “exponential” increase in service purchases. “From now on, there is $ 5 billion that we will look into,” an official said.

The magnifying glass is focused on software development, insurance and consulting, articles that have cost $ 1,000 million in the last seven months and in which a giant like Globant participates. The idea is that there is a new advance declaration scheme through the Complete System for Monitoring Payments Abroad for Services (SIMPES), which allows you to analyze tax compliance and economic and financial capacity (CEF) of companies.

today there are three filters to import. The first it is the CEF, a group of indicators whose formula is defined by AFIP. On the other hand, they are licenses approved by the Secretariat of Commerce and finally the Central Bank authorization to access the dollar at official valuea procedure that can be subject to a minimum term of 90 to 180 days, depending on the type of permit, product and if there are loans, and quotas for advance and sight payments.

Despite the tightening of restrictions last June, before the resignation of Martín Guzmán, the BCRA continues to have difficulty accumulating foreign currency. According to private calculations, net reserves would not exceed $ 1,000 million. The July trade balance was negative for US $ 437 million. That month, according to Ecolatina, non-energy imports were close to $ 6,000 million, so the new obstacles would seek to lower that ceiling.

In the private sector, they believe that restrictions on consumer goods actually have a marginal impact. “Imagine how crazy they are if they think they are covering the $ 2.5 billion energy shortage of the past four months by putting whiskey, private jets and yachts under non-automatic licensing control, this is for the grandstand, the big loss that you have in services, not products, “a source at a foreign trade consultancy firm said.

The list of goods, with new controls:

* Pens and markers
* Whiskey in containers up to 2 liters
* Hinges
* Basic metal jewelry
* Fittings and fittings
* Hangers and hangers
* Hair cutting or shearing machines
* yacht
* luxury aircraft
* Helicopters
* Water bikes
* Electric hammers
* Bakery items
* mouse
* Indicators or pointers for PC
* Electronic cash registers
* Game console
* keyboards
* Speakers
* PC memory cards
* Cryptocurrency mining machines
* Gaming machines
* bovine sperm

Exporters on alert

Unable for now to negotiate incentives for the sector to liquidate foreign exchange, the government will also seek to accelerate exports from the oil complex. It will be through a shortening of the deadline to export when using imported goods under the temporary admission regime, with which they access the official dollar. The idea is that they export within a maximum period of 8 months, instead of the current maximum period of 2 years.

The products benefiting from the benefit are vehicles, soybeans, iron, chemicals, textiles and leather, among others. But out of a total of $ 3.786 million imported under this scheme in the past seven months, nearly half is for soy, according to authorities. Cereal companies ensure they can adapt to a shorter export deadline, but warn that they will not be able to continue exporting if they receive non-automatic licenses.