The landed cost of a Chinese car: the five lines every quote is made of
A price that arrives as one number is not a price, it is a total — and a total you cannot check is the most expensive kind. Every quote we issue decomposes into five lines, and every quote from any exporter decomposes into the same five. Learn them and you can compare two offers in a minute and see which one has quietly buried the freight.
The five lines
FOB is the car at the port of loading, before it moves. Freight and insurance carry it across, plus marine cover. Duty and taxes are the destination's charge stack applied to CIF. Port and agent fees are terminal handling, clearance and storage if a unit sits. Registration is plates and, in some markets, an initial technical inspection.
If a quoted figure does not show all five, the missing line has not been waived. It has been folded into another line, or it will arrive at the port as a bill nobody mentioned.
One car, four destinations, done by hand
Take a four-year-old 1.5-litre saloon at 12,000 US dollars FOB, with 1,500 dollars of freight and 120 dollars of insurance. CIF is 13,620 dollars. In the UAE, 5% duty and 5% VAT put the landed cost near 15,016 dollars, about 10% above CIF. In Saudi Arabia the same car lands near 16,446 dollars with 5% duty and 15% VAT, about 21% above CIF.
Ghana and Nigeria are heavier. Ghana charges a banded duty, eight further lines including NHIL, GETFund, the COVID-19 levy, ECOWAS and the AU levy, and then 15% VAT on the whole stack. Nigeria charges 20% duty, a 5% used-vehicle import levy, a Green Tax by engine size, a 7% surcharge on duty, 0.5% ETLS, 1% CISS and 7.5% VAT. Both land around 37% above CIF — within a few dollars of each other for entirely opposite reasons.
Three lines buyers underestimate
The age penalty is the first. In Ghana a passenger car above ten years adds 5% of CIF, and above twelve it adds 20%; on the example car that is a 2,724 dollar swing before VAT is applied to it. In Nigeria the twelve-year line is not a penalty but a wall.
Engine size is the second, and in these markets it is a tax bracket rather than a performance figure. Ghana bands duty by capacity, so a 3.5-litre unit can sit in the 20% band while a 1.5-litre sits at 10%. Nigeria's Green Tax runs from nothing below 2,000cc to 4% at 4,000cc.
The inland leg is the third. Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic and Bolivia are landlocked, and the truck from the port is often a larger line than the sea freight that came before it.
How to lower it without cheating
There is no honest way to make duty disappear. A declared value far below the market invites a customs uplift plus a delay, and the saving ends up smaller than the delay. What genuinely works is choosing the vehicle against the tariff: buy to the year, buy to the engine band, and fill the container so that freight is divided across three or four units instead of one.
The published charge stack for each destination, and the age limit that applies to it, is on the market page for that country — and the arithmetic is on the landed-cost calculator, which applies every line in the order that country's customs system applies it: import duty calculator.
