Brasilia rewrites duty relief for 491 capital goods, zeroes tariffs on 34 IT and telecom products, and reshuffles its truck and farm machinery lists in a single September package, sharpening a year-long recalibration of the ex-tarifário regime that global equipment suppliers can no longer afford to ignore.
BRASILIA, September 7, 2026
Brazil’s foreign trade authorities on September 4 unveiled a three-part package of import tariff changes covering more than 500 product lines, in the latest and one of the broadest adjustments yet to the country’s ex-tarifário regime, the mechanism through which Brasilia grants temporary duty relief on machinery and technology goods that have no domestically produced equivalent.
The measures, adopted by the Executive Management Committee (GECEX) of the Chamber of Foreign Trade (CAMEX), which sits under the Ministry of Development, Industry, Trade and Services (MDIC), modify import duties on 491 capital goods, temporarily eliminate import duties on 34 information technology and telecommunications products, and revise the ex-tarifário lists covering trucks, trailers, semi-trailers, and agricultural and road machinery.
The capital goods changes took effect immediately on September 4, 2026. The duty eliminations for the 34 IT and telecom products, and the revisions to the vehicle and machinery lists, take effect on September 11, 2026. Where reduced or zero rates were granted, they run through August 31, 2028, aligning the new concessions with the standard expiry horizon that GECEX has applied to recent ex-tarifário grants.
The package has been recorded by Global Trade Alert, the Swiss-based trade policy monitor, as interventions 159589, 159590, 159613 and 159616, linked to Brazilian state acts catalogued as 100313, 100329 and 100331. Significantly, Global Trade Alert’s assessment indicates that the capital goods measure is not a uniform liberalization. According to the monitor’s records, some elements of the 491-line modification raise import duties rather than lower them, a change the organization classifies as affecting foreign suppliers in China, Germany, Italy, Japan, France, Mexico and India, among other exporting economies.
That dual character, relief for some product lines and recomposition of tariffs for others, is the defining feature of Brazilian capital goods trade policy in 2026. The September 4 package is best understood not as an isolated administrative housekeeping exercise but as another installment in a deliberate, year-long rebalancing of how open Brazil’s market for machinery and technology imports should be, and on whose terms.
What the ex-tarifário regime does, and why it matters
The ex-tarifário mechanism is one of the most consequential and least understood instruments in Brazilian trade policy. Brazil, as a member of Mercosur, applies the bloc’s Common External Tariff, under which capital goods and IT and telecommunications equipment have historically carried duties that can reach into the double digits. For a capital-importing economy whose manufacturers rely heavily on foreign machine tools, production lines, testing equipment and network gear, those tariffs represent a direct tax on investment.
The ex-tarifário regime softens that burden selectively. When an importer can demonstrate that a specific piece of equipment has no equivalent produced in Brazil, GECEX may create an “ex,” a carve-out from the tariff line, that temporarily reduces the import duty, in most cases to zero, for that precisely described good. The concessions are time-limited, typically expiring on a fixed horizon such as the August 31, 2028 date attached to the current grants, and they are reviewed continuously. Domestic producers can contest a concession by demonstrating that they make an equivalent product, in which case the carve-out can be revoked and the full tariff restored.
Mercosur rules accommodate the practice through national exception lists for capital goods and for IT and telecom goods, meaning Brazil can deviate from the Common External Tariff on these categories without breaching its obligations to Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. The framework list for capital goods concessions is maintained under GECEX resolutions and updated in batches several times a year, which is why trade lawyers and customs brokers in São Paulo track the committee’s sessions the way bond traders track central bank meetings.
The commercial stakes are substantial. Machinery and mechanical appliances constitute Brazil’s largest import category, worth roughly 26.8 billion dollars and close to 15 percent of total imports, according to trade data compiled by Eximpedia. Every batch of ex-tarifário decisions therefore shifts real money: a zero rate instead of a double-digit duty on a multi-million-dollar production line can decide whether an investment project clears its internal hurdle rate.
A package with three moving parts
The first and largest component of the September 4 package modifies import duties on 491 capital goods lines under the ex-tarifário framework. Based on Global Trade Alert’s classification, the measure mixes liberalizing and restrictive elements. New and renewed concessions carry reduced or zero duties through August 31, 2028. Other lines, however, saw duty treatment tightened, consistent with the pattern the monitor has documented across Brazilian capital goods decisions this year, in which concessions are stripped from goods that domestic industry has shown it can supply, restoring the full tariff.
Brazilian legal publishers tracking the official gazette reported that the September 4 decisions amend the annexes of the standing GECEX resolution that consolidates capital goods concessions, adding items such as robotic harvesting machines and self-propelled olive harvesting equipment, with validity through August 31, 2028. Specialist advisories, including the law firm Marcelo Morais Advogados and the legislative tracker LegisWeb, have catalogued the measures among a dense sequence of GECEX acts published in early September.
The second component eliminates import duties on 34 IT and telecommunications products from September 11, 2026 through August 31, 2028. These goods fall under Brazil’s separate concession list for informatics and telecom equipment, a category where the Finance Ministry has flagged particularly high import dependence. The temporary zero rates give telecom operators, data center builders and electronics manufacturers a defined two-year window of duty-free access for equipment without a Brazilian equivalent.
The third component revises the ex-tarifário lists for trucks, trailers, semi-trailers, and agricultural and road machinery, also effective September 11. This list operates alongside the main capital goods framework and matters intensely to Brazil’s logistics and agribusiness sectors, which depend on specialized hauling and field equipment. Days earlier, on September 1, GECEX had separately adjusted the procedures for extending concessions on auto parts without national equivalent production, according to Marcelo Morais Advogados, underscoring how active the committee’s calendar has been around the vehicle and machinery ecosystem this quarter.
The 2026 pivot: from blanket relief to managed openness
To grasp why some of the 491 capital goods lines saw duties rise, one has to rewind to February. In the early weeks of 2026, GECEX executed what Brazilian tax practitioners have called a tariff recomposition for the capital goods and IT universes. A resolution published on February 5, identified by the law firms Machado Meyer and Mattos Filho as GECEX Resolution 852 of 2026, raised import duty rates across an extensive list of capital goods and IT and telecom products that had previously enjoyed reduced or zero treatment.
According to an analysis published by the Brazilian legal review Consultor Jurídico, products that had been subject to a zero tariff were moved to a 7.2 percent rate from March 1, 2026. The same analysis cited a Finance Ministry technical note, SEI 501/2026, which reported that import penetration in Brazil’s capital goods market had reached almost 45 percent in 2025, and 54.8 percent for IT and telecommunications goods, figures the government read as evidence that blanket duty relief was hollowing out domestic manufacturing rather than merely filling supply gaps.
The recomposition was cushioned by transition mechanisms. A companion measure, identified by Machado Meyer as GECEX Resolution 853 of 2026, opened a window from February 9 to March 31 for importers to request temporary 120-day duty reductions on goods caught by the increase. And on February 27, GECEX restored zero duties on 105 capital goods and IT products where petitioners demonstrated no domestic equivalent existed, according to the legislative tracker LegisWeb and the trade news portal Comex BR, which cited the resolution published that day.
Since then, the committee has processed the backlog in large tranches. Global Trade Alert recorded an August 2026 measure modifying import duties on 750 capital goods, its intervention 158339, and the September 4 package now adds nearly 500 more lines. The through line is a policy of managed openness: duty-free entry remains available, but only for equipment that clears the no-domestic-equivalent test, with everything else migrating back toward the Common External Tariff.
The rebalancing is explicitly tied to Nova Indústria Brasil, the industrial policy launched by the Lula administration in January 2024, which set mission-oriented targets for reindustrialization backed by state financing. The MDIC has framed tariff policy as one lever among several for rebuilding domestic capacity in machinery, electronics and green technology. As the Finance Ministry’s technical note made clear, the government views the import penetration ratios recorded in 2025 as incompatible with those goals, and the ex-tarifário lists have become the operational battleground where the tension between cheap imported capital goods and domestic industrial ambition is adjudicated line by line.
Stakeholders: machine builders cheer discipline, importers count costs
Brazil’s machinery producers, represented by the industry association ABIMAQ, have been the most consistent advocates of tighter ex-tarifário discipline. The association has long argued that concessions were being granted for goods with viable Brazilian equivalents, undercutting local factories at the very moment the government’s industrial policy was asking them to invest. In its commentary on Nova Indústria Brasil, published through its INFORMAQ channel, ABIMAQ has argued that a strong capital goods sector is essential for autonomous industrial growth and that the sector requires stable rules, macroeconomic predictability and competitive financing to fulfill that role.
The association’s members have reason to want relief. ABIMAQ reported that the sector’s net revenue fell 8.6 percent in 2024 to 270.8 billion reais, according to DatamarNews, and the Rio Times reported in 2026 that the association now projects an 8.4 percent decline in machinery and equipment net revenue for this year, citing rising imports and high domestic interest rates as central threats. For ABIMAQ, every concession stripped from a good with a Brazilian equivalent is a sale recovered for a domestic plant.
Importing industries and their advisers see the ledger differently. The February recomposition drew sharp criticism from investment-dependent sectors. The Brazilian mining suppliers association ABPM published a pointed commentary in February titled, in translation, “Brazil also has its own tariff hike: the price of forced industrialization for investment,” arguing that raising duties on capital equipment taxes the very modernization the government says it wants. Law firms advising importers, including Machado Meyer, flagged points of attention in the February resolutions and urged clients to inventory their equipment pipelines, file concession petitions early, and document the absence of domestic equivalents rigorously, because the burden of proof now sits squarely on the importer.
The National Confederation of Industry (CNI), which represents the breadth of Brazilian manufacturing, has historically had to straddle both camps, since its membership includes machinery makers who benefit from tariff protection and equipment buyers who bear its cost. No specific CNI statement on the September 4 package had been published at the time of writing.
For foreign suppliers, the committee’s decisions land unevenly. Global Trade Alert’s records associate the tariff-raising elements of the September 4 capital goods measure with commercial interests in China, Germany, Italy, Japan, France, Mexico and India, a list that maps closely onto Brazil’s largest machinery suppliers. German and Italian builders of precision machine tools, Japanese and French makers of industrial automation systems, and Mexican and Indian exporters integrated into hemispheric supply chains all face the possibility that specific product lines they ship to Brazil have moved from duty-free entry to full Common External Tariff treatment, while competitors whose equipment retains a concession keep their advantage.
The China dimension
No supplier has more at stake in Brazil’s capital goods tariff arithmetic than China. The Rio Times, citing industry data, reported that China’s share of Brazilian machinery imports reached 31.4 percent in 2024, roughly ten times its share at the turn of the century, and that China consolidated its position as Brazil’s top machinery supplier with about 34 percent of the market in the first quarter of 2025, ahead of the United States and Germany. Trade statistics compiled by Trading Economics show Brazil imported around 13.3 billion dollars of machinery, nuclear reactors and boilers from China in 2025 alone.
That surge is precisely what alarmed Brazilian policymakers. The Finance Ministry’s import penetration figures for 2025 reflect, in large part, the arrival of competitively priced Chinese equipment across categories from injection molding machines to telecom network gear. The ex-tarifário tightening does not discriminate by origin, since concessions attach to product descriptions rather than to countries, and doing otherwise would raise WTO questions. But in practice, restoring tariffs on goods with Brazilian equivalents falls heavily on the supplier with the largest and fastest-growing share of the market, which is China.
At the same time, the concessions that survive, and the 34 IT and telecom lines newly zero-rated through August 2028, will in many cases be filled by Chinese factories too, because for much of the advanced equipment on the list there is no Brazilian producer and the most competitive foreign source is Chinese. The regime therefore simultaneously shields Brazilian machine builders from Chinese competition where they exist and deepens reliance on Chinese supply where they do not. Managing that paradox, without provoking friction with Brasilia’s largest trading partner, is one of the quieter diplomatic subtexts of CAMEX’s tariff calendar.
Economic impact: investment costs, inflation and the credibility test
The macroeconomic effects of the September package cut in two directions. The duty eliminations and renewed concessions lower the cost of capital formation at a moment when Brazilian industry needs it. Cheaper imported machinery feeds directly into productivity, and the two-year horizon through August 2028 gives project planners a usable window of certainty. For telecom and data infrastructure, the zero rates on the 34 IT lines reduce the capital expenditure bill for network expansion at a time of heavy investment in connectivity and computing capacity.
The tariff-raising elements work the other way. Equipment that lost its concession becomes more expensive immediately for any importer without an alternative, and the February precedent of moving zero-rated goods to 7.2 percent, documented by Consultor Jurídico, established that reversals can be broad. Economists sympathetic to the recomposition argue the increases are targeted at goods where domestic supply exists, so buyers can substitute locally. Critics such as ABPM counter that domestic equivalents are often more expensive, slower to deliver, or equivalent only on paper, so the real-world effect is a higher investment cost that filters through to the price of everything Brazilian factories produce.
There is also a credibility dimension. The ex-tarifário regime works only if investors trust that a concession granted today will survive long enough to matter. The rapid sequence of changes in 2026, recomposition in February, partial restoration in late February, a 750-line modification in August recorded by Global Trade Alert, and now the September package, has made the regime more dynamic but also less predictable. ABIMAQ itself, in its Nova Indústria Brasil commentary, emphasized that capital goods operate on long planning cycles and depend on stable rules. That warning cuts both ways: it applies to the domestic producers ABIMAQ represents, and equally to the foreign suppliers and Brazilian importers whose investment cases now hinge on the outcome of the next GECEX session.
Implications for global importers, exporters and supply chains
For exporters shipping machinery, vehicles or IT hardware to Brazil, the September 4 package carries several practical lessons. The first is granularity. Because concessions attach to precise product descriptions within tariff lines, two nearly identical machines can face radically different duties. Suppliers need to verify, line by line and ex by ex, how each item in their Brazilian order book is treated after September 4 and September 11, rather than assuming category-level continuity.
The second is the calendar. Concessions granted in this cycle expire on August 31, 2028. Suppliers and their Brazilian customers should plan deliveries and customs clearance within that window, and anticipate that renewal will require fresh evidence that no domestic equivalent has emerged. A Brazilian manufacturer that begins producing a comparable machine in 2027 can trigger revocation well before the nominal expiry.
The third is the petition process. The regime rewards engagement. Importers that file well-documented concession requests, with technical specifications demonstrating the absence of national equivalents, have repeatedly succeeded in restoring duty-free treatment, as the February restoration of 105 product lines showed. Foreign manufacturers increasingly support their Brazilian distributors and customers in those filings, supplying the engineering documentation that makes or breaks a petition.
The fourth is strategic. Brazil is signaling that long-term access to its capital goods market on favorable terms may eventually require producing there. Nova Indústria Brasil pairs tariff recomposition with financing incentives for local manufacturing, and the direction of travel is unmistakable. Global equipment makers weighing the Brazilian market now face the same calculus that automakers confronted decades ago: export over a rising tariff wall, or invest behind it.
For supply chain managers outside Brazil, the package is also a reminder that South America’s largest economy is an active, fast-moving tariff jurisdiction. Global Trade Alert’s running record of Brazilian interventions this year, from the February recomposition through the August 750-line modification to the four September entries, describes a state that adjusts its applied tariffs on investment goods more frequently than almost any comparable economy. Compliance teams that review Brazilian duty treatment annually are reviewing it too rarely.
What comes next
GECEX meets regularly and its ex-tarifário docket remains full, with petitions pending across capital goods, IT and telecom, auto parts and the vehicle lists. Two markers are worth watching. The first is whether the committee continues to pair each tightening with restorations, as it did in February, which would confirm that the regime remains a functioning safety valve rather than a one-way ratchet. The second is the August 31, 2028 expiry wall, when the current generation of concessions lapses simultaneously, setting up what could be the largest single renewal exercise in the regime’s history.
For now, the September 4 package stands as a concise statement of Brazilian trade policy in 2026: open where domestic industry cannot supply, closed where it can, and revisable at every meeting. Exporters in Shanghai, Stuttgart, Milan, Osaka, Lyon, Monterrey and Mumbai have been given notice, line by tariff line, that access to Brazil’s machinery market is no longer a standing entitlement. It is a concession, in every sense of the word, and concessions in Brasilia now come with an expiry date and a burden of proof.