The Mexican Secretariat of Economy has recently published an agreement which amends the Mexican foreign trade rules and criteria and implements new import / customs requirements for certain product types.

With immediate effect, the agreement introduces requirements for cellular devices subject to Mexican standard NOM-221-SCFI-2017, whereby an IMEI Certificate of Conformity (CoC) to this standard must now be presented at Mexican Customs at the point of import.

A summary of the changes can be found below:

·      Only cellular devices subject to Mexican standard NOM-221-SCFI-2017 are impacted by this change.

This applies to both new and existing Approvals – if a device was approved prior to the announcement of NOM-221-SCFI-2017 in August 2018, manufacturers must still seek a NOM-221-SCFI-2017 IMEI CoC and present this at Customs moving forward.

·      The agreement specifies that only 3 Mexican HS codes are currently subject to NOM-221 Customs Verification. These are:

o  8517.12.99

o  8517.62.99

o  8517.69.99

·      Applying for a NOM-221-SCFI-2017 IMEI CoC only is a paperwork-only process. The applicable IFT technical standard is IFT-011-2017 (Part 1).

o  The announcement states that any IMEI CoC referencing technical standard IFT-011-2017 (Part 1) only, will also demonstrate compliance to NOM-221-SCFI-2017.

·      The announcement states that any IMEI CoC referencing technical standard IFT-011-2017 (Part 1) only, will also demonstrate compliance to NOM-221-SCFI-2017.