HOW TO GET THE TOTAL COST WHEN IMPORTING A CAR IN TANZANIA

Prepared by Emausy Kivike
BFS ID: 152714
BFS Advisor – Tanzania
Whatsapp: +255 719 870 890

Introduction

Hello BE FORWARD SUPPORTERS, congratulations on all the hard work you have been doing to this program and the benefits from it. In order to make our work easy we need to be equipped with knowledge on how to calculate the costs specifically for Tanzanian members in order to inform their customers, as some customers want to know only the total without its breakdown. This may be your first time to know how do it and therefore join me up to the end. At the end of these explanations we will be in a position to know the approximated cost for a given car.

If you have any question or suggestion concerning car importation in Tanzania, please do not hesitate to bring it up here.

Explanation of Some Words Used

There are abbreviations used like FOB, CIF and TRA which are briefly explained here as follows:

  • FOB – Free On Board. It means the actual price of a vehicle before the addition of other costs like insurance, inspection and transport.
  • CIF – Cost Insurance Freight. It means a price that includes FOB (Cost), Insurance, Freight and inspection in our case.

Inspection and insurance are compulsory to abide with our government regulations, failure to that you will get penalty when your car arrives at the port and therefore it is advised to include them even though they are optional on BE FORWARD website.

Inspection has advantage to a customer as well since anything that seems to not work in the car will be fixed prior to shipment.

  • TRA – Tanzania Revenue Authority

1st Step

Use BE FORWARD website http://www.beforward.jp/  to browse your favorite car.

We will use the following example:
https://www.beforward.jp/toyota/ist/bf573122/id/694327/?mfg_year_from=2006

We will use the following details captured from selected car above as a sample

2nd Step

Record details of the car. These details will be used to calculate the total import tax including vehicle registration in a TRA calculator.

  • Make
  • Model
  • Manufacture Year
  • Fuel Type (diesel/ petrol)
  • Model Code
  • Engine Size(CC)

Make: Toyota Model:  IST  Manufacture Year: 2006
Diesel/Petrol:  Petrol  Model Code: NCP 60 Engine Size: 1,290

3rd Step

Record CIF. This will be obtained by selecting a country of destination, in our case the destination port is Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. By scrolling down you will see delivery cities and their respective CIF, for instance in Tanzania, it shows city like Dar es salaam, Mbeya, Arusha  and Mwanza.  See the image below.

We will use Dar es salaam with CIF $2,557

Currency Exchange

In order to convert USD to TZS you can use an online calculator using the following link to obtain an up to date information as this may change daily.
http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/convert/?From=USD&To=TZS

4th Step

Visit Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) website  www.tra.go.tz  and click on the  CALCULATOR AND TOOLS link to get a calculator.
http://tra.go.tz/index.php/calculators-tools  then enter or choose the details of the car   matching those obtained at 1st  step. Click on the Calculate Taxes button to get the result.
NB: for those using smartphone with small screen size change the orientation to landscape/horizontally.

5th Step

Port costs. These depend on the type of a car. Because of that variation we won’t discuss it today in more details. We will prepare its description as independent topic to make it understood. In the case of our car it is approximated to be 1,000,000/= TZS .

6th Step

To get the total cost, find the sum of values obtained from 3rd, 4th  and 5th steps
3rd Step (CIF)
4th Step Total taxes
5th Step Port costs

Grand total = CIF + Total taxes (TRA) + Port costs.
For example:  5585766.50 +  4,007,065.51 + 1,000,000 = 10,592,832.01 TZS
Therefore approximated total costs until the car reaches the customer will not exceed 11 Million TZS.

Note that the higher the CIF the higher the price and vice versa for this car.

Thank you.

Question/Suggestion
Whatsapp: +255 719 870 890
Email: kivike.net@gmail.com
BFS ID: 152714

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