Third world countries usually have very heavy import and sales taxes as the corrupt elites prefer to tax consumption than income, wealth or inheritance. In Brazil, for example, all tech costs for the consumer in dollars at least twice what it costs for the American consumer due to 60% import tax plus some variable 18 to 30% sales tax (similar but not the same as a VAT). Factor in freight and the fact those items are in practice luxury goods with the importer expecting high margins and the scenario is complete for absurd price increases

Not the OP, but in India, the lowest priced one I could find was from ASUS, which costs around $2600. I don't think the vanilla RTX 3080Ti is available here yet. The most expensive one was from MSI which costs around $3200. Whereas PS5 (official price i.e. without considering the shortages) costs $675.

Apologies for the late response. I was joking actually, we really do have a major surplus of hardware, but the prices we pay are insane, and have always been so. I built my PC back in 2015 and paid about two times more what I would have paid if I lived in the US.

I ordered a lot of stuff from the US throughout the years. It takes at least a month to get here, and shipping costs from $50 (for the smallest items like Kindles), to $150-200.

So it's not really practical.

Looking at retail:

— the cheapest 3080 Ti 12GB I see is around $2500, the most expensive one is $3200 (there are 10 models in total).

— PS5: from $1000 to $1350

— 3080: from $2000 and up.

If you have the right connections you can get them individually with bulk prices, but it's not easy to do because of pervasive corruption.

>Governments will usually demand you register a company in order to be able to legally export them.

Nah. As long as you don't sell many, you can get away with just marking as gift and putting a value of 20 USD on the package.

New RTX 3080 sell on US eBay for US$1500-1600. RTX 3080 Ti for $2000. <https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gpu-pricing-index>

Oops, sorry. See here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29148838

It's true, it's heavily unfair that the tech giants have better access to manufacturing, etc. And while I 100% agree with @scott_w's sibling comment, this not even the only factor.

How many people do you think they have dedicated only to supply chain management ? This is such a wide domain, we don't see it all from here: they have engineers dedicated to sourcing, to manufacturing, testing, evaluating new sources; people in charge of a given supplier; people in charge of the various type of transport, of recycling, etc. All this is in-house expertise, and definitely gives them an edge.

If you look at most big auto manufacturers; they too are suffering from shortages. So it seems tech giants must be doing something better.

Relationships, knowledge and ability to long-term bulk-buy in order to skip the queue. Suppliers want to work with customers who they know will be large customers in 5 years time and not just some random bloke who rocks up and tries to buy 30 chips on a Tuesday.

No? If you're talking about the link I posted - 3300pln is about £600, and it includes two games and a controller. So MSRP of the console itself at £449 + 2x games at £50 + 1x controller at £50 = £600.

Plenty of people in this thread, including your parent post, have found it at around MSRP.

Then I can only recommend walking into JB Hi-Fi in the Carousel shopping centre in Cannington and asking to go on their list.

Worked for us, we really weren't expecting it. We were even given a choice of which version of the console we wanted, at the point they got the delivery in.

(Maybe things have got worse in the last month? Maybe WA is special...)