Foreign trade agent

Trading and intermediary firms include firms in legal and economic terms independent of the producer and consumer of goods or services ^[1] . Foreign trade agents carry out their activities on their own behalf, but on behalf of and at the expense of the final buyer or producer of goods ^[2] . The remuneration of a reseller is the agreed amount of interest on the amount of goods or services sold.

A foreign trade agent provides services related to the international purchase and sale of goods, including the search for producers of goods, preparation and conclusion of a foreign trade contract, foreign exchange transactions, the implementation of a foreign trade transaction, and the sale of goods on the domestic market. As a rule, foreign trade agents provide their clients with a full range of logistics services. With the participation of resellers, 75–80% of the global turnover of goods and services is currently being implemented ^[3] .

The figures on the right show one of the models of foreign trade intermediation, which is widely used in the international trade market.

Using the services of a Foreign Trade Agent in international trade allows, in comparison with direct export-import operations, to obtain a number of advantages:

• reduce the number of issued transport, customs and warehouse documents ;
• reduce the time for processing and reissuing documents ;
• Get lower freight rates through cargo consolidation
• reduce the cost of customs clearance services;
• reduce the cost of maintaining your own logistics department;
• eliminate the need for communication with state regulatory authorities;
• eliminate the need for the execution of foreign trade documents by the Customer;
• make settlements between the Customer and the Foreign Trade Agent in rubles;
• reduce the value of the transport component in the final cost of the goods;
• reduce financial and transport risks;
• reduce the value of the transport component in the final cost of the goods;
• reduce financial and transport risks;
• savings of the exporter on the creation of its own distribution network in the country of the importer , since it has a trading and intermediary company;
• deliverance of the exporter from solving problems related to the sale of goods;
• reduction of delivery time, increasing sales efficiency, in particular, by organizing consignment warehouses abroad;
• reduction of distribution costs for mass deliveries of the same type of goods.

• High business dependence on one company;
• the risk of leakage of confidential information, which is a company’s trade secret;
• the inability to take goods from the manufacturer for quality, since the Foreign Trade Agent cannot have specialists in all areas of industrial and consumer goods production.

• 1. Matyukhin I.S. Organization and technique of foreign economic operations: a Training manual. - M.: Rotprint VAVT, 2002. - p. 193.
• 2. Kholopov K.V .. Savinov Yu.A. Technology of foreign trade transactions. M .: VAVT, 2010 .-- p. 62.
• 3. Chepurnoy M.Yu. The Development of International Transport Infrastructure and Delivery Technologies for Combined Foreign Trade Cargo in Russia: A Thesis Study. M .: Rotaprint VAVT, 2010.

• The official website telling about the service "Foreign Trade Agent" (Russian)