Global Trade Alert

 On 29 June 2015, the Indonesian Trade Ministry published regulation 45/M-DAG/PER/6/2015 introducing further restrictions on the imports of tires.
With the new provisions, importers of tires specified in the annex of the regulation will be required to obtain specific licenses:

• if the imported tires will be further used in the production process, a producer's licence (IP-Ban) will be required. The license will be valid for one year and during the application the importer shall inter alia present a recommendation from the Director General for Chemistry and Textiles at the Ministry of Industry.
• if the imported tires will be sold or traded, a trading license (IT-Ban) will be required. The license will be valid for three years and during the application the importer shall inter alia provide proof on sufficient transport and storage capacities.

In general, an entity will not be allowed to obtain both licenses, thus prohibiting companies to import tires for both production and trading purposes. This particular restriction may be seen as a concrete example for the implementation of regulation 45/M-DAG/PER/9/2009, prohibiting companies from importing goods for both production and trading (cf. Related Measures).
In this particular regulation, IP-Ban holders may import tires for trading only in the case of market testing (art. 12 of regulation 45/M-DAG/PER/6/2015). Even then, the permission will be restricted to six years with a maximum prolongation of another six years.
Furthermore, the new provisions restrict the ports of entry for tires to one of five sea ports and to international airports (art. 16).
The regulation comes into force 3 months after its implementation, i.e. on 7 October 2015. It revokes the previous regulation on tires 40/M-DAG/PER/12/2011 (cf. Related Measures).
Similarly to the previous regulation, the technical inspection or verification (art. 17 of regulation 45/M-DAG/PER/6/2015) shall be conducted in the loading port.
Due to the unavailability of trade data in the UN COMTRADE database for the year 2014, the list of affected trading partners is based on 2013 volumes.
Update
On 29 September 2015, the Indonesian Ministry of Trade published regulation 78/M-DAG/PER/9/2015 scrapping the regulation at hand. Hence, these additional import restrictions on tires never went into force. Regulation 78/M-DAG/PER/9/2015 was part of the reform package announced by the Indonesian president on 9 September 2015.