GTEB to stop collecting fees next year

The Garments and Textile Export Board (GTEB) will stop collecting all assessment and processing fees next year to enable the industry to save on costs and invest more on gearing up for competitiveness in the international marketplace.

At present the GTEB charges garments firms a fee for quota assessment, transfer processing costs and quota application.

For assessment, local export quota (EQ) holders pay P0.05 centavos per square meter equivalent (SME) of the total quantity of products they export.

SMEs are computed based on a conversion factor per product category granted under the Philippines’ garments and textile agreements with other countries.

GTEB computes transfer fees as follows: under temporary transfer, it is P7/dozen for critical categories and P1.75/dozen for non-critical; under permanent transfer, it is P35/dozen for critical and P8.75/dozen for non-critical; and under swap/shift transfers, garment firms are charged P200 per transaction.

There is a P50 fee for quota application.

The removal of the said fees is only one of the many steps the GTEB is taking to help local garment manufacturers and exporters.

Aside from quota allocations, the GTEB helps GMEs to meet their quota requirements through its supervised transfer, swap and shift scheme.

Transfer refers to relocation of an export quota holding in a particular category from a source firm (transferor) to a recipient firm (transferee).

Swap is an exchange of quota holding under two different categories of the same status between two firms.

Under the shift scheme, GMEs may shift allowable percentages of quota based on the RP-US bilateral agreements.