Insights · 2026-09-15

"Where does landed cost go?"

For the same goods, the unit price on the quote and the real landed cost are often three parts apart. This breaks those parts out, and marks which are official figures and which are industry figures.

The three parts outside the quote

The unit price on a quote usually covers only one part of landed cost: goods value. The other three - tariffs, freight, and the rest (insurance, port charges, destination clearance and compliance) - often only become visible once the goods actually land.

So when comparing, compare landed cost with all four parts spread out, not unit price. Two of the parts have moved a lot recently.

Of the four, tariffs and compliance depend on the destination, freight depends on the route and sailing schedule, and the rest depends on port charges and the clearance method - none of them is a supplier's pricing habit.

Rebate changes: the official timetable is out

The Ministry of Finance and the tax authorities announced in January 2026: from 1 April 2026, VAT export rebates are cancelled for 249 solar and related products; from the same day until 31 December 2026, the battery rebate falls from 9 percent to 6 percent, and is cancelled from 1 January 2027.

Export rebates are part of a supplier's cost structure. When they shrink, the ex-works price and the quote for the same goods are usually recalculated - not necessarily because "the seller wants more", but because the basis for pricing changed.

For long-term contracts already running, it is worth pulling out the repricing clause and checking whether the rebate rate is written in as a variable.

Freight: industry figures show rerouting has lifted the baseline

Industry figures put the World Container Index at around $2,172 per FEU in March 2026, with spot rates on disrupted routes between $2,200 and $9,500 per FEU.

Industry figures also show Asia-Europe services fully rerouted via the Cape of Good Hope, Suez transit fees up around 22 percent, and a premium of $1,850 per TEU on Shanghai-Rotterdam 40HQ, 63 percent above the 2025 average.

The point of these numbers is not any single shipment, but that freight is no longer a small item you can ignore in a quote. When negotiating long-term contracts, write down who bears freight and how it is adjusted, and add one line on which index it follows and how often it is reviewed - far easier than arguing afterwards about who lost out.

The direction of exports is itself shifting

Official 2025 figures: China's exports were 26.99 trillion yuan, up 6.1 percent year on year, with the trade surplus passing one trillion US dollars for the first time; exports to the US fell about 20 percent, while those to the EU rose 8.4 percent and to Southeast Asia 13.4 percent.

Read that together with the costs above: the same supply chain now has a different cost structure depending on where it ships. Confirming where the goods ultimately go before quoting is more reliable than asking broadly "what is the landed cost".

To see which other items on a quote are easily missed, start with the free verification checklist; the report sample shows how we write cost assumptions out item by item.