EXW (Ex Works)

EXW places the delivery point at the origin end of the journey. Once the goods are made available at the named place, the buyer bears the costs and the risk of loss or damage from that point onward, and is the party who must contract for carriage and deal with the formalities of getting the goods out of the country and into another.

Cost

Sits with the buyer from the delivery point onward. The seller’s price reflects the goods where they stand, not the goods delivered anywhere.

Risk

Passes to the buyer at the delivery point. Everything that happens to the goods after that — in transit, at the border, at sea — is the buyer’s exposure.

Carriage

The seller is under no obligation to contract for transport. The buyer organises the entire chain.

Insurance

Neither party is obliged to insure for the other. A buyer who wants cargo cover arranges it for its own account.

Export and import formalities

Both fall to the buyer under this rule. This is the asymmetry that distinguishes EXW from every other term in the set.

The defining practical feature of EXW is that the buyer is responsible for export formalities in a country where the buyer is usually not established. Customs administrations generally expect an exporter of record who has standing in that jurisdiction — a registration, a tax identity, an ability to be held accountable. A foreign buyer may have none of these.

The result is that the seller frequently ends up performing, or lending its name to, export steps the term does not oblige it to perform. That arrangement can work, but it means the documentary and legal position no longer matches the term the contract names. Where the export declaration is made in the seller’s name while the term allocates the obligation to the buyer, questions about who is accountable for the declaration’s accuracy are not answered by the delivery term at all.

EXW appears most often in transactions where the buyer is already operating in the seller’s country — a trader, aggregator, or exporter with local presence collecting from farms or upcountry stores. In that setting the export-clearance asymmetry largely disappears, because the buyer genuinely is established where the goods are.

It fits less comfortably where the buyer is genuinely foreign and the goods are perishable or regulated. Agricultural consignments frequently require official attestations issued in the exporting country — phytosanitary or sanitary certification, for example — which are obtained through processes anchored to the exporting jurisdiction and, in practice, to a party present in it. The delivery term allocates who must obtain them; it does not make a distant party able to.

• The party bearing risk from the delivery point may have no presence at, or visibility of, the place where the goods sit
• Condition at handover matters more for perishable goods, and the term fixes the risk boundary at exactly that moment
• Official export attestations are obtained in the exporting jurisdiction, whoever the rule says must obtain them
• Where the seller performs export steps informally, the paperwork and the contract can end up describing different arrangements