North China’s Tianjin Customs has issued a total of 2,230 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) certificates of origin from January to July this year. The certificates involved exports worth 905 million yuan ($1.33million), according to statistics from Tianjin Customs.

“Thanks to the RCEP certificate of origin, we only need to pay a 3.6 percent tariff for our straw hats to the importing country, 0.8 percent lower than in the past, which is quite important for small and micro enterprises(SME),” a person in charge of a knitting company in Tianjin said.

The company is a private SME located in Tianjin Economic and Technological Development Zone. Its main export goods are straw and cloth hats. Since the beginning of this year, the company has exported nearly 50,000 straw hats, with an export value of about 2.6 million yuan.

Since the beginning of the year, Tianjin Customs has set special windows and a consultation hotline for RCEP services. Online training courses have also been held to popularize the RCEP tariff policy among enterprises. Application costs toward the certificate have been reduced with self-service and intelligent measures.

RCEP is by far the world's largest free trade deal, which went into force on Jan. 1, 2022. Covering about 30 percent of the global population, gross domestic product and trade volume, the agreement was signed on Nov. 15, 2020, after eight years of negotiations.