Is Santa Catarina China's warehouse in Brazil?
A southern state with one in twenty of Brazil's jobs bought a fifth of everything Brazil imported from China in 2025, and its governors have announced Chinese factories since 2012. A tax reform starts to remove the state's import credit in 2029.
Is Santa Catarina China’s warehouse in Brazil?
Santa Catarina works as China’s warehouse in Brazil, not as its factory floor. The state’s companies bought US$14.5 billion of goods from China in 2025, 20.4% of everything Brazil bought there, while the state drew 2.6% of the Chinese investment projects counted in Brazil since 2007 (MDIC, 2026; CEBC, 2026). Of the 16 Chinese factories announced for the state since 2012, 2 run today: a battery plant in Laguna and a network-equipment plant in Joinville. The import trade rests on a state tax credit that pays for resale and stops when an importer turns the goods into something else, and the federal tariff wall has pulled the large Chinese plants to Bahia, São Paulo, Paraná and Espírito Santo.
Santa Catarina is a southern Brazilian state with one in twenty of the country’s formal jobs (Ministério do Trabalho e Emprego, 2026). Its companies bought 2.4 times as much from China in 2025 as in 2019, and the cargo lands at Itajaí, Navegantes, Itapoá and São Francisco do Sul (MDIC, 2026). Since 2012 the state’s governors have announced Chinese truck, car, tyre, battery and scanner plants, from Sinotruk in Lages to Neusoft in Porto Belo. The federal tariff on Chinese electric cars reached 35% in July 2026, and a tax reform passed in 2023 starts to remove the state’s import credit in 2029 (Gecex, 2023; Planalto, 2023).
A warehouse and a factory floor leave different marks in the data. A warehouse state books imports of finished goods, collects a tax credit for them and sends them on to buyers in other states. A factory-floor state turns Chinese capital, parts and machines into goods made on its own ground, with plants, payrolls and registered companies to show for it. Comex Stat, the federal trade database, books every import in the importer’s state, so it measures the warehouse. The factory floor shows in a census of Chinese capital in the state, which we built row by row from company registers, regulators and the state’s own announcements.
Santa Catarina takes a fifth of Brazil's imports from China and under a twentieth of its Chinese and foreign factory capital.
Santa Catarina's share of the Brazilian total on five measures, %: imports from China by importer state (accented), formal jobs, gross domestic product, Chinese investment projects counted by CEBC from 2007 to 2025, and foreign direct investment in manufacturing from all countries.
How we measured it
Each reading predicts something different in five places, and the test was to look at all five (Fig. 2). The trade comes first. Comex Stat records each import with the importer’s state, municipality and customs office, and each export by product, so it shows where Chinese goods are booked, which companies bring them in, which lines Santa Catarina buys for the whole country, and how imports move when a tariff changes (MDIC, 2026). A factory floor imports parts and machines for local plants. A warehouse imports finished goods and sends them on.
The second test is the capital. No public source gives Chinese investment by state in money: the Conselho Empresarial Brasil-China (CEBC) counts projects by state, the Banco Central never crosses the investor’s country with the state, and the American Enterprise Institute’s tracker has no location field (CEBC, 2026; BCB, 2025). So we built a census of Chinese capital in Santa Catarina from 2010 to October 16, 2026. It has 72 rows, each with its source and date: 18 assets in the state, 19 commercial, logistics or finance branches, 28 announcements that are not in operation, and 7 rows of context left out of the counts. A company counts as Chinese when its controlling group sits in mainland China or Hong Kong, and an announced factory is a manufacturing or assembly project named for the state.
The third test is the industry. RAIS, the labour ministry’s register of every formal job, gives the jobs in each industrial class by municipality at the end of 2024 (Ministério do Trabalho e Emprego, 2026). From it we measure whether Santa Catarina already makes what it imports, which is where a Chinese plant would find workers and suppliers. For every product line we also measured how far the federal import tariff rose from December 2023 to October 2026, from the Gecex resolutions in the official gazette.
On all five tests Santa Catarina reads as a warehouse.
What a factory floor and a warehouse would each show, and what the data for Santa Catarina show, 2019 to 2026.
| Test | Factory floor | Warehouse | Found |
|---|---|---|---|
| Importers | Plants that use the goods | Traders at the ports | Itajaí 45%, Joinville 13% |
| Share by line | Near its 5% of jobs | Many times that | Over 5% in all 34 big lines, over 20% in 28 |
| Tariff steps | Assembly moves in | Imports rush, then stop | Cars bunch in May and June |
| Announced plants | Built in a few years | Most go silent | 2 of 16 run |
| Chinese firms | Plants with payrolls | Branches and stakes | 2 plants, 19 branches |
Santa Catarina’s purchases from China more than doubled in six years
In 2019 Santa Catarina’s companies bought US$6.1 billion of goods from China. By 2025 they bought US$14.5 billion, and in the 12 months to September 2026 they bought US$15.6 billion, the most for any 12 months on record (MDIC, 2026). Brazil as a whole bought almost twice as much from China in 2025 as in 2019, so Santa Catarina grew faster than the country it supplies. From January to September 2026 its purchases rose 10.5% on the same months of 2025, against 9.9% for Brazil.
Santa Catarina's purchases from China have never been higher.
Imports from China by Santa Catarina importers, sum of the last 12 months, US$ billion, December 2019 to September 2026; dashed lines mark the steps of the federal tariff on electric cars.
China’s share of the state’s own imports rose from 36% to 43% over the same six years, so purchases from China grew faster than those from every other supplier together (MDIC, 2026). Santa Catarina’s share of Brazil’s purchases from China went from 16.9% in 2019 to a peak of 23.0% in 2024, and stood at 20.4% in 2025 (Fig. 4). The dip in 2025 came from both sides of the ratio. Brazil’s purchases from China rose US$7.3 billion, and US$2.7 billion of that was one floating oil platform, with fertilisers and pesticides adding US$1.4 billion; none of those goods pass through Santa Catarina’s traders. The state’s own purchases of solar modules fell from US$654 million to US$399 million after their tariff rose to 25% in November 2024 (Gecex, 2024b). Without the platform, its share in 2025 would have been 21.2%. São Paulo, with three tenths of Brazil’s economy, is the only state that buys more from China.
Santa Catarina's share of Brazil's imports from China rose from 17% to 20% in six years.
Santa Catarina importers' share of Brazil's imports from China, by year, %; the first and last years accented.
A dearer yuan did not slow the buying. One yuan cost R$0.57 on average in 2019 and R$0.77 in September 2026 (BCB, 2026; Federal Reserve, 2026). The yuan rose by a third against the real, and over the same years the state’s purchases from China more than doubled. The flow is about what the state offers importers, which is ports, bonded warehouses and a tax credit, more than about the price of Chinese goods.
The trade runs one way. In 2019 Santa Catarina bought US$4.40 from China for every dollar it sold there. In 2025 it bought US$12.00, because purchases rose while sales fell from their 2021 peak (MDIC, 2026). A factory floor would export some of what it makes. The state’s sales to China are almost all soybeans and meat, and the one flow tied to Chinese capital is leaf tobacco, which China Brasil Tabacos buys from growers through four receiving units in the state (Receita Federal, 2026).
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