Expensive Manila Harbor charges

[Talim]

Just ordered some equipment fro China for around 300 Usd only.

The freight if dealed with Philippino was over 500 Usd for loading in China and other + +

The chinese supplier found us a deal were the freight charges were just 150 Usd all in all Chinese side for this 1 cubic meter material.

The goods once in Philippines, complication and heavy invoicing starts!

6'000 P for LCL, then 19'000 P for customs clearance and above this there is duty and taxes to follow still + warehousing charges

After multiple email, each email drops a 3'000 pesos down, we should have our goods out for something under 30'000 Pesos all include finally.

So, buy cheap, bring it over here and Hell of expensive it will be !

Not a registered company yet, this was prolly a problem in all this, but it is second time i have to handle freigth with Philippinos and it is a nightmare of handling and bargaining process.

If anyone would have one easy to go with, freighter, i would gladly try him next time ...

[raynaputi]

Philippine Customs is really a rip off government agency honestly. I once ordered some jeans from Victoria's Secret US online and the quoted customs tax amounted to almost P1500 pesos which is 3x the price of what i bought online! they have a computation guidelines of how the tax is computed but i find it so when some things are computed twice! When I declined to pay the amount, they said they could subtract some from the amount and I could just give them half the price of the computed tax, but I can't take the receipt. HELL YES I agreed! I don't need the receipt anyway! So in the end, I only payed them P600!

I found from other forums which has Philippine Customs issues that it's better to ask sellers to declare the items bought online as a "GIFT" so that buyers would only have to pay P30 - P35 for customs tax...It's okay for some small quantity items, I'm not sure though to the ones with bigger quantity items.

[Pete/London]

Years ago I tried to import used engines from Japan, I spent weeks sourcing contacts in Japan only to come up against filipino gov agencies. Sums up the Philippines, very difficult to conduct honest business.

[rani]

hard to admit but its soooooo true