Welcome to this week’s Sourcing Spotlight.
In this weeks edition, links two big shifts: China’s market-access-for-know-how playbook and the new EU–India FTA, both of which could quickly change your landed-cost maths, pricing strategy, supplier travel priorities, and compliance exposure.
Feature Story
Starmer’s China Reset
Starmer’s China trip landed a cautious reset with a few outcomes you can actually model: China will cut the UK whisky import tariff from 10% to 5% from 2 February 2026, and has agreed 30 day visa free entry for UK citizens for tourism and short term business, with implementation detail still worth double checking before travel. Add in cooperation on irregular migration and the message is clear: both sides want calmer channels for trade and mobility, without pretending the hard security and values issues have vanished.
China’s Market Access Playbook
China didn’t catch up by accident. It used access to its huge domestic market as leverage to pull in foreign know-how through JVs, approvals, standards, localisation and day-to-day operational exposure, then scaled that learning with industrial policy to build national champions and reduce reliance on overseas tech. For SMEs, the move is simple: treat “localise/share” requests as an IP risk signal, ringfence your core process knowledge and tooling files, and build dual-source optionality before cooperation quietly becomes competition.
EU–India Free Trade Agreement
EU–India have closed a major FTA that could make India meaningfully cheaper and simpler as a sourcing and sales market, especially across industrial goods, autos and premium consumer lines, but the real gatekeepers will be timing, quotas and rules of origin. If you sell or source cross-border, now is the moment to map your top HS codes, run two landed-cost scenarios (today vs phase-in), and sanity-check whether your origin paperwork will survive a customs audit. Read the full breakdown for the tariff watchlist, sector carve-outs, and a practical “do-this-first” checklist.
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That’s it for this weeks Sourcing Spotlight.
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Until next time,
Quiet sourcing. Loud impact.
