Target export country

Which export countries?

You will have to select your targeted market with care, depending on the financial capacity of your company, on how far you want to sell your products, regarding transport costs, custom duties, local norms…
Mauritius has several trade agreements with many countries which you should consider when thinking about new markets. The main agreements are:

COMESA is a regional grouping of 19 African states established to promote intra-regional trade. It has a potential market size of 389 million people.
List of COMESA Countries: Burundi, Comoros, Congo DR, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

COMESA (Members of FTA) benefit from 100% reduction on  import on all products.

COMESA (Non-FTA Members) - Mauritius is currently giving 90% tariff reduction on goods imported from the other COMESA countries which are not part of the Free Trade Area.

Rules of Origin for Egypt - 45% of value addition required

SADC Free Trade Area: Twelve of the 14 SADC member countries have established a Free Trade Area. The SADC FTA creates a regional market worth US$360 billion with a total population of 170 million and includes economies growing by up to 7% a year. Angola and Congo DR are set to join the FTA adding a further US$71 billion and 77 million people to the SADC market. Nowadays producers and consumers benefit from import tariffs on an estimated 85% of all goods in the 12 countries. The SADC regional integration programme includes a Customs Union by 2010, a Common Market by 2015, a monetary Union by 2016 and a single currency by 2018.
List of SADC countries: Angola, Botswana, Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe

AGOA: The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) is a United States Trade Act that significantly enhances U.S. market access for (currently) 39 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. The Act originally covered the 8-year period from October 2000 to September 2008, but it has been extended to 2015. At the same time, a special dispensation relating to apparel was extended to 2012. A revised textile certificate of origin was published to give effect to the "abundant supply" provisions contained in the most recent legislative changes.
AGOA builds on existing U.S. trade programs by expanding the (duty-free) benefits previously available only under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) program. Duty-free access to the U.S. market under the combined AGOA/GSP program stands at approximately 7,000 product tariff lines, including the roughly 1,800 product tariff lines that were added to the GSP by the AGOA legislation. Notably, these include items such as apparel and footwear, wine, certain motor vehicle components, a variety of agricultural products, chemicals, steel and others.