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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

If building hardware products wasn't hard enough. This could kill a lot of companies pretty quickly. If you have massive inventory in China or you've invested in a factory to build things at scale and now your US margins are underwater, I'm not sure what you do.

Nintendo is facing the same thing. Nintendo had tried to avoid Trump's first term tariffs in 2019 by spending a ton of money moving Switch production to Vietnam only for Vietnam to get hit massive 46% tariffs this week:

https://www.designdevelopmenttoday.com/industries/manufactur...

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> US margins are underwater

Increase price and pass cost of tariffs down to consumer

Every company should present their prices with the tariff separately

Widget Pro 2: $1000 + Republican Tariff $460

Oh and don't personify Trump in these tariffs, always refer to them as the "Republican Administration Tariffs" so the rank and file senators can't hide behind "but it was Trump".

They are enabling this crap.

This would be consistent with US practice of displaying price always excluding tax.

The US market is like half of Nintendo's money.

Add to that, consumers were already price sensitive on Nintendo, they've never been a "good value" situation.

They already raised the price quite a lot for the Switch 2 (compared to the first console) and people were already complaining about the prices BEFORE you had to slap an extra $200 per console and $20 per game for a "Americans didn't pay attention to 6th grade" tax.

This is really going to hurt the console market, like, in general.

I lack references for it. But to the best of my knowledge it is not just US tariffs on the PRC that is driving the migration of manufacturing for Japanese companies away from the PRC over the last decade or so, but also the increasingly tense relations between Japan, ROC, and South Korea and the PRC. It should be emphasised that it is of course gradual given the massive investments made by Japanese companies over many decades, but it is noticeable as a Japanese consumer.

> But to the best of my knowledge it is not just US tariffs on the PRC that is driving the migration of manufacturing for Japanese companies away from the PRC over the last decade or so

Cost has increased as China itself domestically has matured (both as a consumer and the manufacturing side).

Even China itself has moved some to e.g. Vietnam.

Nintendo clearly should have moved production the the USA and fully automated it. Thereby paying no tariffs and employing no americans except cleaning or repair staff.

> If you have massive inventory in China or you've invested in a factory to build things at scale and now your US margins are underwater, I'm not sure what you do.

Don’t have massive production in China if you want to sell in the US. The writing has been on the wall for this for almost 20 years. Even Obama was talking about it in 2007-08.

> Don’t have massive production in China if you want to sell in the US.

How does this help? Everyone has already tried shifting to Vietnam, India, etc only to be hit by tariffs anyway.

Maybe you should build your factories in America if you want to sell to Americans. IDK.

Same applies for social media, software, services, etc right? They’d build their software in their own countries instead?

I’m not sure the US would be winning after crashing all the tech companies…

the reciprocal tariffs against US services will hit mostly blue states (and "blue" people), thus achieving domestic political goals.

Most trade war reciprocal tariffs are carefully targeted for political pressure rather than blanket. Under Republican presidents you might tariff whiskey (easily substitutable, made mostly in red states) and under Democratic ones Boeing or Facebook.

Not clear that works at this scale, though.

That's fine. AI will obsolete those jobs. And when it does we will want production in the US.

In the same way that production if brought into the US will lean heavily on automation since it will be cheaper than the pay any US employee will demand.

OK, start producing jeans for pennies 12 hours a day

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