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Ley 7546/2025 is the sector-strategy pillar of Paraguay's three-law industrial-policy package enacted simultaneously on 8 September 2025 (Gaceta Oficial Nº 205). The other two pillars are:
a flat 1% maquila tax on Paraguayan value-added or export-invoice value, recognising service-maquila modalities (BPO, software, digital services), and extending benefit duration to 20 years.
exemptions, customs-duty waivers on capital goods, VAT credit certificates, and regulatory-stability guarantees for qualifying investment projects.
Ley 7546/2025 functions as the national-policy statement that gives MIC the mandate to promote and coordinate the sector. Its principal operative provisions are:
1. Strategic-sector designation: Formal recognition of electrical/electronic/electromechanical/ digital equipment production and assembly as a strategic productive sector — the legal predicate for preferential treatment under the companion fiscal and maquila regimes.
2. Capital-goods use restriction: Imported capital goods and materials benefiting from fiscal incentives must be used exclusively for production and assembly under the qualifying regime; personal-consumption or off-project commercialisation is expressly prohibited — a standard audit-and-compliance hook.
3. Domestic sale and export rights: Beneficiaries may sell domestically and export produced/ assembled goods, subject to applicable technical regulations and environmental compliance — removing any restriction to purely export-oriented operations seen in earlier maquila-only frameworks.
4. Technical-standards roadmap: MIC, in coordination with INTN (National Institute of Technology, Standardisation and Metrology), is mandated to progressively establish technical standards for production and assembly — a forward-looking institutional mechanism to formalise the sector's quality-certification infrastructure.
5. Dual monitoring system: The Executive Branch, through MIC, is authorised to establish on-site and off-site surveillance of investment projects from preliminary evaluation through full execution — providing the compliance and audit architecture for the incentive programmes.
This is Paraguay's first discrete sector-specific industrial-policy statute for the electronics/electrical cluster. Prior to September 2025, Paraguay's electronics-assembly activity operated solely through the generic maquila framework (Ley 1064/1997) without a dedicated sector strategy document. The statute positions Paraguay's hydro-electricity structural cost advantage (Itaipú-Yacyretá — among the lowest industrial-electricity rates in South America) as the anchor comparative advantage for energy-intensive electronics and electromechanical manufacturing.
The package closes the PY full-geographic-blank in the IPTM register. Paraguay has been one of South America's fastest-growing export-platform economies (consistently among the top Mercosur performers for maquila export growth since 2018) yet had zero prior IPTM filings.
mandate + export-platform regime + fiscal-incentive instruments — that is structurally comparable to Brazil's PADIS programme, Argentina's Ley 27.506 Economía del Conocimiento, Costa Rica's Régimen de Zonas Francas (Ley 7210), and Honduras's ZEDE framework.
to attract electronics-assembly FDI from Asian OEMs (especially Chinese white-label and Taiwanese contract-assembly operations) seeking a Mercosur-accessible, low-tax, low-electricity-cost production base.
to software/BPO/digital-services operators, broadening the target investment community beyond physical-goods assembly.
fail to issue standards quickly, the quality-certification gap will constrain export of finished goods to markets with mandatory conformity requirements (EU, US, Brazil INMETRO).
"progressive" development without a statutory deadline.
The full investment-incentive architecture is only operationally complete once the reglamentary decree specifies the qualifying criteria and tier thresholds.
framework? Watch for MIC / REDIEX FDI-pipeline announcements in late 2025 / 2026.