Refrigeration and Cold Storage Equipments in Sri Lanka

No deposit can be wired until the buyer is Customs-registered

The most immediate change for a Sri Lankan purchaser arrived in June 2026. Under Extraordinary Gazette 2493/39 of 18 June 2026, a bank may process an advance import payment only after it has verified the importer's registration with Sri Lanka Customs. The bank must also assign a unique transaction number to each import foreign-exchange payment and report the proforma invoice number to Customs.

In practice this reorders the transaction. A buyer who is not yet Customs-registered cannot pay a deposit, so registration has to be completed before, not alongside, the order. The proforma invoice number also becomes a tracked data point, which means invoice numbering has to stay consistent from the proforma through to the final commercial invoice; reissuing a proforma under a new number part-way through, as often happens when a specification changes, creates a mismatch between what the bank reported and what arrives with the goods. Agree the numbering convention and revision discipline when the quotation is accepted.

Landing at Colombo

For containers there is effectively one option. The Port of Colombo handles the traffic across Jaya Container Terminal, South Asia Gateway Terminals, Colombo International Container Terminals and the West Container Terminal, with Hambantota, Trincomalee and Galle taking negligible container volume. Colombo is in the middle of an expansion programme of roughly two billion US dollars, so check terminal allocation and handling with the forwarder for the booking in hand rather than carrying it over from a previous shipment.

Plugs, frequency and what the temperature figure assumes

Supply is 230 V at 50 Hz. On plugs the country has deliberately narrowed: a 2016 government decision standardised on Type G, the British 13 A pattern, and the sale of non-compliant sockets was banned from August 2018, so the older Type D and Type M fittings should not be designed into new equipment. The technical point specific to this division is that a compressor's rated capacity is tied to the supply frequency it was rated at, which makes frequency a contract term rather than a detail. Refrigerant should be named in the specification. Where Ice Cream Display Freezers or a Food Showcase Freezer and Chiller and Cooler are going into an unconditioned retail space, the ambient they must work against and the pull-down required after restocking decide whether the quoted temperature band is realistic; settle both at quotation.

Selling to public bodies

Government buying follows the Procurement Guidelines and Manual 2024, gazetted in November 2024 and administered by the Ministry of Finance with the National Procurement Commission as oversight. PROMISe at promise.lk is the national electronic platform, with 324 active procuring entities as at August 2026, while NPC ePMS covers monitoring and procurement plans. A full-function national system is still being procured, so many notices still appear in newspapers and on individual agency websites and PROMISe should not be assumed to carry everything. Warranty, installation and training are set by the supply contract; spares and servicing are not provided.