Shipping alcohol to Thailand? (Wine limit 10 liters??)

[recvoid]

Hey everyone, I was recently looking into shipping some beer to thailand as a gift but can't really wrap my head around the laws.
Legally at the airport you are allowed to bring in 1 liter for free but as I was surfing the web I found the following document from Fedex stating it's possible to ship up to 10 liters of Wine as a gift! (http://www.fedex.com/international/pdf/International_Wine_Shipping_Guide_v_3_2.pdf)

So i'm wondering if the same can be applied to Beer.
Does anyone have any experience with this?

Thanks alot!

Edited April 2, 2018 by recvoid

[jackdd]

I found the following document from Fedex stating it's possible to ship up to 10 liters of Wine as a gift! (http://www.fedex.com/international/pdf/International_Wine_Shipping_Guide_v_3_2.pdf)

Where does it say "gift"? They are writing about a business sending wine to a customer

[recvoid]

Page 11. Read the contents

Thailand 1. FedEx® International Air Waybill. 2. Commercial Invoice. 3. Consignee requires an Import License above 10 liters. 1. FedEx® International Air Waybill. 2. Commercial Invoice. 3. Make a notation on the Commercial Invoice that the wine is for “personal use, not for resale”. 1. Personal purchase – 10 liters.

[jackdd]

Yes, i read this

They write Licensee (which means a business that has a license to sell wine) to Customer

And one of the required things is a commercial invoice (as a private person you can't write a commercial invoice)

[recvoid]

Ok I think you are mistunderstanding what I would like to do.  In this case I would order from a shop across the pond (licensee) and let them send it as a gift to me (consumer)

[jackdd]

I understand what you want to do, you want to cheat customs by having the sender declare it as gift. I think you are misunderstanding how customs work

A bottle of wine has a value, let's say 500THB, if the shop declared it with a value of 0USD the customs will just look it up or estimate the value.

According to what i found on Google the import tax for wine from USA is about 400%, so customs will ask you to pay 2000THB tax per bottle when you go to pick it up.

[FritsSikkink]

1 hour ago, recvoid said:

Page 11. Read the contents

Thailand 1. FedEx® International Air Waybill. 2. Commercial Invoice. 3. Consignee requires an Import License above 10 liters. 1. FedEx® International Air Waybill. 2. Commercial Invoice. 3. Make a notation on the Commercial Invoice that the wine is for “personal use, not for resale”. 1. Personal purchase – 10 liters.

I think you missed this part on page 4:

Duties and Taxes: As a general rule, the duties and taxes on alcoholic beverages can be very high. Duties and taxes in some countries can be over 100 percent even for gift or sample shipments. Many countries also assess special excise or luxury taxes to alcoholic beverages.

 

The price of the Wine + transport, insurance is taxed by 60% + 7% VAT.

Good luck. 

[recvoid]

5 hours ago, jackdd said:

I understand what you want to do, you want to cheat customs by having the sender declare it as gift. I think you are misunderstanding how customs work

A bottle of wine has a value, let's say 500THB, if the shop declared it with a value of 0USD the customs will just look it up or estimate the value.

According to what i found on Google the import tax for wine from USA is about 400%, so customs will ask you to pay 2000THB tax per bottle when you go to pick it up.

Just trying to get some nice beer in as a gift, I don't care paying tax over it but what I do care about is that it will be confiscated as I don't have a license or whatever excuse they may bring up as like I stated before if you bring more then 1 liter by airport they will take it. No option to pay tax over it.

[recvoid]

4 hours ago, FritsSikkink said:

I think you missed this part on page 4:

Duties and Taxes: As a general rule, the duties and taxes on alcoholic beverages can be very high. Duties and taxes in some countries can be over 100 percent even for gift or sample shipments. Many countries also assess special excise or luxury taxes to alcoholic beverages.

 

The price of the Wine + transport, insurance is taxed by 60% + 7% VAT.

Good luck. 

This is for wine which is higher as beer, it goes by alcohol % nowadays if im correct.
Beer should be a bit lower, but i'm still unsure of how many liters you are allowed to bring it. If wine is up to 10 liters what would beer be.

[jackdd]

3 minutes ago, recvoid said:

Just trying to get some nice beer in as a gift, I don't care paying tax over it but what I do care about is that it will be confiscated as I don't have a license or whatever excuse they may bring up as like I stated before if you bring more then 1 liter by airport they will take it. No option to pay tax over it.

Are you sure about this? 1 liter is free, but i'm quite sure that you can take more than that with you. Of course you have to use the red customs channel, declare it and pay the tax for it.

[recvoid]

 

2 minutes ago, jackdd said:

Are you sure about this? 1 liter is free, but i'm quite sure that you can take more than that with you. Of course you have to use the red customs channel, declare it and pay the tax for it.

I went to the border in Birma to get some whiskey bottles and when I asked the staff at customs there if I could bring more then 1 liter they said I needed a license. I couldn't just pay tax and bring more. Counts for beer/wine/whiskey anything alcohol.

Edited April 2, 2018 by recvoid

[Andyfez]

The recipient wont thank you when they receive a huge tax bill from FedEx .

I understand your intention, but you can buy many foreign beers here with no trouble.

More trouble than it's worth.

I'd also question the custom limits you quoted.

I could be wrong, but I thought wine restrictions were much tighter in thailand than you state.

They make no discrimination between wine and spirits, but I don't recall the regulations between tax free and tax paid.

 

Edited April 3, 2018 by Andyfez

[ChiangMaiLightning2143]

The beneficiary of this "gift" could be in the sights Thai customs (possibly most intransigent institution in the Kingdom) for every satang of tax and duty under law or maybe even threatened with some vague interpretation of an offense of importation without license and a large fleecing demanded out of thin air under penalty of heavy fines and  jail.

 

A bad idea.

[ThaiWai]

There's always a guy who thinks he's found a loophole because he's smarter than everyone else. 

[Henricus]

15 hours ago, recvoid said:

Just trying to get some nice beer in as a gift, I don't care paying tax over it but what I do care about is that it will be confiscated as I don't have a license or whatever excuse they may bring up as like I stated before if you bring more then 1 liter by airport they will take it. No option to pay tax over it.

in pattaya we have a importer for special beer pm for details 

[Manny]

Yes what Jackdd wrote is correct. They are referring to "Commercial Samples". Your beer will be hit with massive import duties. It is set up to

stop grey imports. Forget about it. Alcohol is one of those very heavily protected industries. As they say "Don't even think about it" Drink Local

[JerseytoBKK]

21 hours ago, jackdd said:

I understand what you want to do, you want to cheat customs by having the sender declare it as gift. I think you are misunderstanding how customs work

A bottle of wine has a value, let's say 500THB, if the shop declared it with a value of 0USD the customs will just look it up or estimate the value.

According to what i found on Google the import tax for wine from USA is about 400%, so customs will ask you to pay 2000THB tax per bottle when you go to pick it up.

I've seen this 400% number thrown around and I think it's not correct. I've priced the same bottles here that I can buy back in the US and they are usually 3X more expensive. A 400% would mean they would be 5X more expensive.

 

One very interesting price point is that Gold label Johnny Walker is now almost the same in both countries since the dollar fell to 31 Baht. It was slightly cheaper here last year before the dollar fell. Typical retail in US is $65 and here it's 2,000 Baht. 

[jackdd]

13 minutes ago, JerseytoBKK said:

I've seen this 400% number thrown around and I think it's not correct. I've priced the same bottles here that I can buy back in the US and they are usually 3X more expensive. A 400% would mean they would be 5X more expensive.

 

One very interesting price point is that Gold label Johnny Walker is now almost the same in both countries since the dollar fell to 31 Baht. It was slightly cheaper here last year before the dollar fell. Typical retail in US is $65 and here it's 2,000 Baht. 

That's because if you buy a whole shipping container of wine you don't pay the retail price.

Let's say the retail price in USA is 10 USD, if you buy a whole container from the manufacturer you pay maybe 5 USD. 400% tax on 5 USD means 20 USD for tax, add another 5 USD for the profit margin so the wine would be sold here for 30 USD and in the USA for 10 USD.

It's similar if you look at for example luxury cars, they pay 320% tax, but the effective price of for example a Ferrari is "just" 3 times as much as back home.

[recvoid]

1 hour ago, ThaiWai said:

There's always a guy who thinks he's found a loophole because he's smarter than everyone else. 

There's always someone that needs to talk people down cause they have an ego problem.

I'm not looking for a loophole, i'm trying to find clarity on quantities of alcohol one can legally send over including paying tax as there are really good specialty beers available which are worth it for me to ship over only if I can ship at least a couple of liters to cover the shipping costs.

They would be labeled a gift as I have no intention to sell these, (craft beer is expensive enough in Thailand as it is)
 

Edited April 3, 2018 by recvoid

[LongTimeLurker]

On 4/2/2018 at 11:00 AM, jackdd said:

And one of the required things is a commercial invoice (as a private person you can't write a commercial invoice)

The seller will provide the commercial invoice

[LongTimeLurker]

2 hours ago, JerseytoBKK said:

I've seen this 400% number thrown around and I think it's not correct. I've priced the same bottles here that I can buy back in the US and they are usually 3X more expensive. A 400% would mean they would be 5X more expensive.

Did you take off the sales tax on the bottles in the US before you made your comparison?

 

'Cos if they're for export there won't be any sales tax to pay locally.

[owl sees all]

5 hours ago, Andyfez said:

I could be wrong, but I thought wine restrictions were much tighter in thailand than you state.

They make no discrimination between wine and spirits, but I don't recall the regulations between tax free and tax paid.

On Saturday Myself and the wife walked openly through customs at Nong Khai with; 7 litres Lao khow and 2.1 litres of single malt whisky.

[JerseytoBKK]

4 hours ago, jackdd said:

That's because if you buy a whole shipping container of wine you don't pay the retail price.

Let's say the retail price in USA is 10 USD, if you buy a whole container from the manufacturer you pay maybe 5 USD. 400% tax on 5 USD means 20 USD for tax, add another 5 USD for the profit margin so the wine would be sold here for 30 USD and in the USA for 10 USD.

It's similar if you look at for example luxury cars, they pay 320% tax, but the effective price of for example a Ferrari is "just" 3 times as much as back home.

Here's an interesting link about the various markups at different stages in the distribution cycle in US and would be surprised if the margins weren't greater here:  https://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/stories/2002/07/22/editorial3.html

 

A $20 retail bottle will typically leave the winery at around $8. Then the distributor adds their markup to cover their costs and profit and the retailer then adds their markup. You're leaving out shipping costs and profits for the importer,  costs and profits to deliver the goods that a wholesaler makes, and then the retailer's margin.

 

 

[JerseytoBKK]

2 hours ago, LongTimeLurker said:

Did you take off the sales tax on the bottles in the US before you made your comparison?

 

'Cos if they're for export there won't be any sales tax to pay locally.

Yes, federal tax on beer and wine is low in the US. Transporting the bottles from EU or USA will be higher than the tax. Once upon a time I was a national sales manager for a major importer of Scandinavian cheeses into the US so I know what the costs involved in importing goods were 25 years ago. Can't be cheaper now.

Edited April 3, 2018 by JerseytoBKK

[Lacessit]

The shelf life of most beers is around 3 months. This assumes the beer is handled correctly every step of the way to the consumer, and not left to sit on a dock somewhere in the sun. I think it's safe to assume Thai beer has a much less arduous path to beer drinkers than bottles or cans from the EU or USA. Not that America knows how to make beer to start with.

IMHO the OP would find it much simpler to buy the beer here. Rimping in Chiang Mai has at least 50 imported brands.

[tso310]

Here's another depressing link

 http://silklegal.com/importing-alcohol-to-thailand/

[recvoid]

5 hours ago, Lacessit said:

The shelf life of most beers is around 3 months. This assumes the beer is handled correctly every step of the way to the consumer, and not left to sit on a dock somewhere in the sun. I think it's safe to assume Thai beer has a much less arduous path to beer drinkers than bottles or cans from the EU or USA. Not that America knows how to make beer to start with.

IMHO the OP would find it much simpler to buy the beer here. Rimping in Chiang Mai has at least 50 imported brands.

No offence but you must have been living under a rock to not notice the huge amount of excellent local craft beers coming out of the USA these days. Especially the East Coast IPA's are very sought after, Tree House, Other Half, Trillium to name a few...
Those are the types of beers I'd like to get my hands on as a beer enthusiast.

[The manic]

On 4/2/2018 at 6:54 PM, recvoid said:

Just trying to get some nice beer in as a gift, I don't care paying tax over it but what I do care about is that it will be confiscated as I don't have a license or whatever excuse they may bring up as like I stated before if you bring more then 1 liter by airport they will take it. No option to pay tax over it.

There is excellent beer here from Germany, Belgium, Britain, and Thai, American and other craft beers. If you wanna please a Thai buy them chivas and buy it here.  With what you are proposing the weight might cause prohibitive expense. 

Edited April 3, 2018 by The manic

[ericthai]

10 hours ago, recvoid said:

There's always someone that needs to talk people down cause they have an ego problem.

I'm not looking for a loophole, i'm trying to find clarity on quantities of alcohol one can legally send over including paying tax as there are really good specialty beers available which are worth it for me to ship over only if I can ship at least a couple of liters to cover the shipping costs.

They would be labeled a gift as I have no intention to sell these, (craft beer is expensive enough in Thailand as it is)
 

asking here is not going to help you.  Find a shipping agent and speak to them how to do this.

 

PS: I know an agent that speaks good English, (she lived in the USA for over 10 years) we used her company for all of our shipments. PM me if you want her contact info. 

[The manic]

And at this end receiving shipped goods can a time consuming nightmare. Good luck