Selling a foreign bike in the Iquique Free Trade Zone (Zofri)

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Well, before you all get excited, I haven't sold my bike in Iquique, and it's not even clear to me that this can be done. But I did spend half a day today having a go, more out of curiosity than necessity. So here are some notes to save you wasting that half day. Maybe they help you get over the line, but maybe this is actually impossible.

First off, what is the Free Trade Zone? It's a little island inside Iquique where stuff can be traded without paying and VAT or import duties. It's run by Zofri, and there's basically two bits to it - a giant shopping mall and a warehouse area where there's all sorts of stuff going on. It's basically like China town - and there's little companies specialising in importing all sorts of stuff from thermos flasks to lightbulbs.

As far as I have been able to figure out however, VAT and import duty ARE due when goods leave the Free Trade Zone and enter Chile proper as far as the law is concerned. So all that stuff you see in the Free Trade Zone has not actually entered Chile just yet.

As an aside, this is worth seeing - my 2 hours riding up and down it were fascinating if experiencing the cold hard face of free trade and globalisation is your thing, I highly recommend checking out Zofri if you're passing through Iquique.

What does this mean in practice? First off, my Spanish is not that good and some of the bits that I "understood" are plain contradictory. BUT. The Aduana man explained to me that I can entirely legally sell my bike inside the Free Trade Zone. Basically you can unstaple your passport from the bike when you enter the Free Trade Zone (it's as if you exit Chile) then get a notary inside the FTZ to do the selling paperwork and it's all legal.

However, the Aduana man also explained that whoever buys your bike can't do much with it - as it's a second hand vehicle, by Chilean law it's forbidden to import it, and so therefore you're unlikely to find a buyer for it. When the buyer tries to take the bike out of the FTZ he will need to get a TVIP.

This is in plain contradiction of my ride in and next to the Free Trade Zone where there are 100s (and I mean 100s) of import companies selling what looked to me like second hand import cars - I can't square these two.

Armed with this info, I found an importer of motorbikes inside the FTZ and went to ask them if they want to buy - they said they only import Chinese bikes and so weren't interested.

I also found a very kind Japanese chap next to the FTZ who specialises in importing large bikes from Japan. He spent half an hour chatting with me in Spanish and I honestly can't say I understood that much of it, but basically he said that in 30 years of importing (he has someone source locally in Japan for him and then put on a boat) he's never bought a bike off a foreigner inside Chile. He said the problem was that if he buys the bike and later has a problem with the paperwork the Aduana just confiscate the vehicle and that's not a risk he's willing to take.

Having said all that, I did have a couple of other leads I couldn't be bothered following up on which were people saying "call me" for the bike - maybe they would have yielded something.

To give you an idea of prices, the nice Japanese man was selling a 2003 BMW1150 with 11k km on the clock for US7.5k and he seemed to think a fair price for my 2011 V Strom 650 with 25k km would be around US6.5-7k.

If I was spending more time doing this I would plaster "Se vende, year, model mileage and price" all over the bike and drive around the Free Trade Zone. I suspect you'll get a lot of interest, but not clear if it's the sort of interest that can end up in a transaction - the Chilenos all go crazy when they see a big bike, but I think that's more curiosity than actual interest in transacting.

Hopefully useful....