1357
Elders [Alex Krokus]
(lemmy.world)
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i do live in brazil so its hard to get good hardware because os shipping and everythings supposed to be around 5x more expensive than stuff in the us (though in practice, its way worse than that)
my brother got lucky and got an rtx 2060 super at the end of the pandemic. the best gpu ive ever had was a gtx750 ti that simply stopped working, meaning im now stuck with no gpu, an i5 6500 and 16GB of ram (my brother got himself more ram and sold a 16GB stick to me that he was using)
So, a number of countries, including Brazil, have VAT, which is considerably higher than US sales tax. Looking online, it looks like Brazil has 17%-19% VAT, and sales tax in the US, aside from a few states that don't have it, is usually in the 6%-9% range.
And I can believe that for some products, maybe localization for Portuguese costs something, and economy of scale is less.
But how can it possibly be 5x? That seems far higher than anything that I could imagine producing. Some countries have protective tariffs to subsidize local industry, but I'm pretty sure that Brazil isn't big in the PC hardware business.
googles
Okay, this is a decade old. They cite other taxes as some of that:
https://thenextweb.com/news/from-brazil-cost-brazil-profit-why-electronics-expensive-Brazil
So, that's pretty hefty. Still not 400%, though.
Okay, but why higher margins?
I could maybe buy that for luxury goods -- that's a thing, Veblen goods, but I don't think that most computer hardware probably qualifies.
Hmm. That might be an argument that protectionist policy is involved.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/brazil-is-among-the-worlds-most-expensive-countries-to-buy-an-iphone/
Yeah, that's specifically referencing imports too.