Certification
In the world practice, certification is one of the most commonly recognized and efficient forms of ensuring high quality and competitiveness of products, maintaining their up-to-date safety, developing foreign trade and guaranteeing security of the internal consumer market.
Most countries admit new products to their markets on the condition that the goods correspond to the national or international safety standards. In order to confirm correspondence to these standards, the products should as a rule be tested and/or certified by an independent accredited or authorized body. Moreover, the customs authorities often require an appropriate certificate for products imported into the country or economic zone.
Russia is a country with a rich cultural and historical past. Rapid growth of the economy, vast territory and people's loyalty to imported goods cause high capacity of the Russian market for foreign investments. Products imported into Russia should comply with the current safety requirements different from the usual international standards. If you are going to establish trade relationships with Russia, you should get to know these requirements beforehand; this will help avoid unnecessary temporal and financial costs when importing productions into the RF.
All imported products undergo confirmation of their correspondence to the established requirements: quality, safety etc. This process is generally called product certification and is executed by authorized Certification Bodies in several basic areas:
- Certification of products under the Certification System GOST R (State Standard of Russia) with issuance of a GOST R Certificate of Conformity
- Fire safety certification with issuance of a Certificate of conformity to Fire safety technical regulations
- Sanitary-and-epidemiological expertise with issuance of a Hygienic certificate (report)
- and other certification systems with issuance of permitting documents for production, sale and use of certain kinds of products.
The certificates shall be presented to the customs authorities together with the customs cargo declaration and are required for obtaining a permit to import products into the RF. The products that have undergone certification and obtained the required certificates based on the examination results will have no difficulties in promotion to the Russian market. The CE quality marking is not recognized in Russia and does not substitute for the Russian certificate of conformity.
The certificate enhances the manufacturer's responsibility to the customers and it is a weighty argument for investment companies, Russian and foreign partners and customers that choose quality products. It also offers advantages when obtaining state orders and tenders, considerably simplifies obtaining of licenses and permits, and increases the sales volume.
The confirmation of conformity in the RF is carried out in the form of an obligatory or voluntary certification, as well as via declaring the conformity. The required certification procedures for each kind of products are defined by the normative legal acts of the respective state ministries.
Depending on what products you produce/sell/import, you may need to obtain one or several documents attesting conformity to the Russian safety standards.