Three import cost changes, and your landed cost model
Three of the numbers inside a landed cost changed in the last seven days. If your quotes are still right, it is because somebody went and looked. Distributor quote to invoice software in South Africa is usually judged on speed, and the thing that actually costs money is where each cost input comes from.
What changed
The customs duty on imported sugar rose 44 per cent on Friday 28 August. Freight News reports the increase from 483.72c per kilogram to 697.92c per kilogram, published in Government Gazette 55269. That is 214.20c a kilogram more, or R2 142 a tonne, on every kilogram landed from Friday.
ITAC may now charge for permits it previously issued free. New regulations enable fees on import and export permits, rebate certificates and trade remedy investigations. They were published in Government Gazette 55255 under Government Notice R.7850 and took effect on the date of publication, also 28 August. They set no amounts and do not require the commission to charge for every listed service, so the exposure is real but unpriced. Relief is available on good cause, and for non-profit and public purpose applicants.
Treasury and SARS have amended the Export Regulations to allow zero-rating where movable goods are delivered for export to terminal operators as well as the port authority. The amendment adds operators holding a port authority licence under sections 57 and 65 of the National Ports Act. It is deemed to have come into operation on 1 April 2026, so it reaches backwards over deliveries already made. That one changes the tax treatment of a delivery rather than its cost, and it is a separate piece of work for whoever prepares your export documentation.
One thing worth putting in front of anybody trading sugar, because it looks like a contradiction and is not. Illovo Sugar South Africa called on 27 August for the revised Dollar-Based Reference Price to be gazetted and implemented. Its position is that the review is complete, the revised price has not been published, and the delay is adding pressure. The duty that moved on Friday moved under the reference price currently in force. A revised one is still sitting unpublished, which means this is not the last move.
A landed cost is seven numbers with seven owners
The reason a week like this hurts is that a landed cost looks like one figure and behaves like seven.
- Supplier price, in the supplier's currency, changing on their schedule
- Exchange rate, changing continuously
- Freight and insurance, changing by lane and by carrier announcement
- Customs duty, changing by gazette
- Import VAT, changing by legislation
- Clearing, port and permit fees, changing by regulation, which is what just happened
- Inland transport, changing with fuel
Each has a different source and a different update rhythm. Nobody owns all seven, and in most businesses that means one person owns the spreadsheet where all seven have been flattened into a single markup.
Specific duty behaves differently from a percentage
The sugar item makes a distinction that catches people out.
A duty expressed in cents per unit is a specific duty. It does not move when the price moves, so when the world price falls the duty becomes a larger share of the landed cost, and a percentage markup carried forward from last year silently under-recovers.
A duty expressed as a percentage of value moves with the invoice and with the rand. The two need different treatment in a pricing model, and a spreadsheet that stores only the resulting rand amount cannot tell you which one it is holding.
The audit that takes an hour
Open the model your quotes are priced off and go down the seven components. For each one, answer two questions in writing.
Where does this number come from. A named source, a portal, a broker's rate sheet, a gazette, a bank feed.
When was it last changed, and by whom. If the cell has no history, that is the finding.
Most businesses discover the same pattern. The exchange rate is updated often because everyone knows it moves. Freight is updated when a carrier writes to them. Duty and statutory fees are updated when something goes wrong at a port, because nothing tells them otherwise.
That last group is the exposure. A rate that changes by gazette and is stored in a cell somebody typed in 2024 is not a rate, it is a memory.
What reading from a source actually means
It does not require expensive software, and it does not mean an automatic feed for all seven.
At the low end it means one place, one owner, one date stamp, and a note next to each figure saying where it came from. Every quote reads from that sheet rather than from a copy.
At the next level the numbers that can be fetched are fetched, starting with the exchange rate, and the quoting system reads the sheet directly instead of a salesperson keying a markup.
The value is not automation for its own sake. It is that when a duty jumps 44 per cent on a Friday, you can list every open quote that used the old figure by lunchtime on Monday, instead of discovering it invoice by invoice. Whether you can pass the increase on is a contract question and a separate one.
Joining the pricing sheet to the quoting system, so a rate changes in one place and every quote written afterwards is correct, is the kind of work Zorah does. It is usually a matter of connecting tools a distributor already runs.
What to do on Monday
Open your pricing model and find the cell holding customs duty. Ask two people where that number came from and when.
If neither can answer within a minute, list every quote issued in the last 30 days that is still open and priced off it. That list is your exposure, and it is the first thing to fix in a distributor's quoting process before anything else in the sales and quoting stack gets touched.