Swiss exports to China: from half to 99.8% duty-free.
A Swiss machine builder shipping to Shanghai pays duty on part of its catalogue and nothing on the rest; which part depends on tariff lines negotiated in 2013. The optimisation concluded in Bern on 20 August 2026 is set to remove that distinction — in stages, and only for goods that can prove their origin.
On 20 August 2026 in Bern, Guy Parmelin, President of the Swiss Confederation, and Wang Wentao, China’s Minister of Commerce, signed a memorandum of understanding concluding the negotiations to optimise the Switzerland–China free trade agreement. The talks, launched in September 2024, took five rounds. The texts now undergo legal review; the aim is signature by the end of 2026, with domestic approval in both countries to follow.
The figure that carried the announcement was 99.8 per cent: the share of Switzerland’s current exports to China that will eventually enter duty-free, up from 53.6 per cent today. The figure that matters to an individual exporter is a different one — the duty line on its own products, and the date on which it falls to zero.
What exists today is a concluded negotiation, not an agreement in force
The underlying treaty is not new. The Switzerland–China FTA was signed in Beijing on 6 July 2013 and entered into force on 1 July 2014 — according to China Daily, the first free trade agreement China concluded with a continental European nation. A first memorandum on enhancement had been signed during Xi Jinping’s state visit in January 2017; a joint statement followed during Premier Li Qiang’s visit in January 2024.
What was signed on 20 August is a three-page memorandum recording that negotiations are concluded and stating the intention to sign the protocol “as soon as possible, in accordance with their respective internal procedures”. The treaty texts themselves will be published only at signature. Until the protocol enters into force, Switzerland Global Enterprise notes, the existing 2014 agreement continues to apply unchanged.
Duty-free coverage rises from half of Swiss exports to 99.8 per cent
The centre of the package corrects an asymmetry that has stood since 2014. Almost all Chinese goods already enter Switzerland duty-free, because Switzerland committed under the existing agreement not to levy duties on industrial products. In the other direction, only 53.6 per cent of Swiss exports enter China duty-free; partial concessions apply to a further 41.4 per cent, and 4.9 per cent is excluded altogether, on SECO’s calculation from Chinese import statistics for 2022–2024, excluding gold.
Under the optimised agreement, 77.5 per cent of Swiss exports become duty-free the day the protocol enters into force, and 99.8 per cent once phase-out periods of between five and a maximum of ten years have run. SECO puts the additional tariff-saving potential at approximately CHF 244 million a year, concentrated in watches, machinery and pharmaceuticals.
The sector table explains where the change bites. Duty-free coverage for watches (HS chapter 91) rises from 1.0 to 100 per cent — though SECO notes China’s luxury tax sits outside the agreement. Pharmaceuticals (HS 30) rise from 29.1 to 100 per cent, chemicals (HS 29) from 50.4, plastics (HS 39) from 52.9, machinery (HS 84) from 74.7, precision instruments (HS 90) from 85.9 and electrical machinery (HS 85) from 89.0 per cent. In agriculture, cheese and roasted coffee gain duty-free access after a ten-year phase-out; Switzerland’s own new concessions are confined to agriculture, with reductions on its more sensitive products kept within existing WTO tariff quotas.
The stakes are set by the size of the relationship: bilateral goods trade excluding gold and other valuables reached around CHF 33.5 billion in 2025 — Swiss exports of CHF 15.2 billion against imports of CHF 18.3 billion — making China Switzerland’s most important trading partner after the EU and the United States.
A tariff concession becomes a saving only when origin is proved
A preference under an FTA is not applied automatically. It is claimed by the importer, against documentary proof that the goods qualify as originating — and the gap between entitlement and capture is measurable. SECO’s FTA Monitor, published in March 2025 with data to 2023, found that across all of Switzerland’s FTA partners, importers used 62.2 per cent of the preferences available to them in 2023, saving CHF 2.23 billion in duties.
For this particular agreement the monitor’s findings are more sobering. On imports from China into Switzerland, the utilisation rate was 32.5 per cent in 2023: CHF 166.8 million of duty was saved, while CHF 195.8 million of available savings went unclaimed — a capture rate below half. No equivalent figure exists for Swiss exports into China, because the export side of the monitor covers only partners that share their customs data, and China is not among them; but the import figure indicates how demanding preference use under this agreement is in practice. SECO’s analysis of non-use points to two causes: for products made in fragmented international value chains, the rules of origin are genuinely hard to meet; and where the duty saved is small, the compliance cost can exceed the benefit. At preference margins of 20 percentage points or more, average utilisation exceeds 90 per cent. The new concessions create precisely such margins — which makes origin capability, not the treaty text, the binding constraint.
The revised rules of origin change which supply chains qualify
The optimisation also rewrites the conditions for qualifying. Under the revised rules, processing operations in the territory of a non-contracting party become admissible under certain conditions, and preferential treatment no longer requires goods to be transported directly between Switzerland and China — consignments consolidated through regional distribution hubs, which today can forfeit preference, may qualify. Conditions for electronic EUR.1 certificates have been established, customs data exchange is enshrined in the agreement, and product-specific list rules have been adjusted to reflect structural change in Swiss industry, notably in food and machinery. A supply chain that fails today’s origin test is therefore worth re-examining against tomorrow’s.
The package reaches well beyond tariffs
Several further chapters matter operationally. In services, Swiss companies established in China gain the right to be sole owners of their subsidiaries in defined sectors — among them technical testing, services incidental to manufacturing, insurance, banking and securities, aircraft repair and ground handling — commitments SECO describes as matching China’s RCEP level overall and exceeding it in insurance and air transport. In investment, both sides commit to national and most-favoured-nation treatment in non-services sectors including manufacturing, and performance requirements — local content, technology transfer, staffing or export obligations — are prohibited; Switzerland exempts its energy sector and reserves policy space for its investment screening legislation. A new digital trade chapter addresses paperless trade and bulk parcel shipments. On export restrictions, future measures must be notified 21 days before entry into force, with a consultation mechanism attached — a clause of direct supply-chain relevance.
The sustainability provisions carry institutional weight of their own: an integrated chapter with binding environmental and labour commitments, including implementation of the Paris Agreement — in SECO’s words, the most ambitious environmental provisions China has ever accepted in a trade agreement. A commitment to ILO fundamental principles at work appears in one of China’s FTAs for the first time, as does a preambular reference to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. economiesuisse, welcoming the outcome, framed it in the language of risk: diversification reduces one-sided dependencies.
What a Swiss exporter can decide before entry into force
The ratification calendar is outside any company’s control. Four pieces of preparation are not.
- Map the catalogue against the schedules. Classify export lines by HS code and establish which go duty-free at entry into force and which follow a phase-out; the line-by-line schedules will be published with the texts at signature.
- Price the entitlement in your own numbers. CHF 244 million is an aggregate; the commercially relevant figure is the duty your Chinese customers currently pay on your products, because it prices your offer against competitors already shipping duty-free under RCEP.
- Build the origin file now. Determine which products meet the list rules, collect supplier declarations, and decide how proof will be issued. The monitor’s figures show the cost of leaving this until after entry into force.
- Re-examine disqualified routes. Hub distribution or third-country processing steps that rule out preference today may qualify under the revised rules.
The sequence to watch is short: signature, targeted for the end of 2026, when the full texts will be published; then approval procedures in Bern and Beijing; then entry into force. The CHF 244 million is a ceiling, not a forecast. The distance between the two is administrative, product-level work — the one part of this agreement entirely within a company’s own control.