It is a special customs regime that temporarily reduces the Import Duty rate. It applies to Capital Goods (BK) and IT and Telecommunications Goods (BIT), provided there is no domestic manufacturer able to supply them under equivalent conditions. The aim is to encourage the modernization of Brazil’s industrial base without financially penalizing those who invest in what the country does not yet produce.
Companies from the most varied sectors can benefit from the regime — from manufacturing to agribusiness, including mining, energy and pulp and paper — provided they are setting up, expanding or modernizing a production line with imported equipment. The central requirement is always the same: to prove that the good has no domestic equivalent under comparable conditions. This proof goes through a public consultation, a period in which Brazilian manufacturers of the same type of equipment may speak up and contest the request before the final decision.
The process begins with a technical request submitted to the Secretariat for Industrial Development, Trade and Services, part of the Ministry of Development, Industry, Trade and Services, containing the detailed description of the equipment and the intended tariff code. After the public consultation and technical review, the result is published in a resolution of the Executive Management Committee of the Foreign Trade Chamber, the body responsible for the final decision. Once granted, the Ex-Tarifário is valid for a set period and is used directly in the customs clearance of the import.
In recent years, this process has also come to require an Investment Project — a technical document that demonstrates the equipment’s function in the operation, the expected productivity gains and the technological essentiality of the investment. More than a formality, the Investment Project is now a central part of the review. See this point further on.
The economic impact of the regime is usually substantial. Equipment subject to a 14% Import Duty rate, for example, can have that rate reduced to 0% when covered by the Ex-Tarifário. Since the Import Duty makes up the calculation base of other taxes levied on the operation, the reduction ripples across the entire tax chain. This way, the benefit is not limited to the reduced tax but is reflected in the final cost of the whole investment project.
In practice, the effect is to free up capital that would be tied up in taxes and return it to the investment itself — whether to acquire more equipment, expand the plant or fund the originally planned expansion schedule. Companies that use the Ex-Tarifário recurrently tend to treat it not as a one-off benefit but as part of their industrial-modernization and cost-of-capital strategy.
