Customers updated with trade regulations for 10 new European Union members
Rockville, MD — May 4, 2004 — NextLinx Corp., a provider of global trade content and management solutions, this week announced the expansion of its international trade content, Global Knowledge, coinciding with the European Union's May 1, 2004, addition of 10 new countries, which increased the number of EU member-states to 25.
NextLinx said it has integrated country-specific content for all 10 countries to provide customers with a single source of global trade rules and regulations for streamlining the shipment of goods across borders.
With a 118 country coverage comprising over 99 percent of the world trade market, NextLinx's Global Knowledge also captures landed cost and import/export data for the newly added EU member-states: Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Malta, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia.
Accounting for the company's largest expansion since the EU's inception, NextLinx built into customers' legacy or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems various changes to Customs tariff rates, duties, licensing, anti-dumping, countervailing, Value-Added Tax (VAT), Excise and quotas that became effective May 1.
Recently, NextLinx said it has seen an increase in interest in automating trade processes to ensure full compliance with Customs and other government agencies. Nearly two dozen new customers signed with NextLinx in 2003 to receive real-time content updates, including Exel, VF Corp., Elite Group Inc., Creo Inc., Digital River Inc., Shipping Solutions, Innovation Norway, ITSC, LCI Foreign Trade Solutions, ProExport, ProChile, Bancomext and Haworth Inc.
"The EU expansion encourages an economic shift in trade with Eastern European countries, creating new alliances and opening new markets for businesses worldwide," said Rajiv Uppal, founder, president and CEO of NextLinx Corp. "With that, numerous regulatory changes must be taken into account when shipping goods in the global marketplace."
When processing country updates or introducing a new country into its product offering, NextLinx said it follows an ISO certified 17-step procedure to collect, translate, replicate and control the quality of content.
NextLinx said its solutions are powered by Global Knowledge, which contains all 97 chapters of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) for shipping any product to and from over 118 countries.
