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Zippy6 on 15 April 2025
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Phenomajp13 said:
RolStoppable said:

Of course it's difficult when there's still a sweeping 10% tariff on all countries right now. That's still significant enough to push up the RRP to $500.

Was there no tariff before? Is it possible that some type of tariff was always included in the $450.00 price?

It's quite hard to find historical information on tariffs on Vietnam before all this kicked off. But after a lot of digging I've finally worked out what the situation in China was and it seems unlikely that tariff's would be more tough on Vietnam than China.

Video Game Consoles (HTS code 9504.50) have not been affected by tariffs from China previously. They were duty free imports from MFN (most favoured nations) which Vietnam also was.

Trump threatened to tariff video game consoles from China and a lot more products in List 4 of Section 301 which resulted in a joint letter from MS/Nintendo/Sony in June 2019: Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft issue joint statement against tariff proposed by Trump administration | VG247

Eventually List 4A did go ahead in September 2019 and a whole range of products were now tariffed at 10%: TRG Section 301 Lists.xlsx

But Video Game Consoles were not part of List 4A. The Video Game Consoles were going to be implemented as part of List 4B: TRG Section 301 Lists.xlsx You can see the consoles in this list here (9504.50) and they were in-line to get a 10% tariff.

However List 4B tariffs were suspended when America reached the "phase one" trade agreement with China: China and United States Reach Phase 1 Deal – List 4B Canceled - USA

So tariffs on 9504.50 (video game consoles) were never implemented on China.

All of this is to say that if tariffs for video games consoles were never implemented on China and they suspended their plans to charge them 10% it's very unlikely they've been charging Vietnam 10% tariffs on video game consoles before they had blanket tariff rates this year. Especially as video game console imports from Vietnam to the USA will have been very low until recently, with Nintendo beginning a shift to Vietnam after Trump's initial threat of 25% back in 2019. As the joint letter linked above says, 96% of video game consoles imported into the USA in 2018 were from China.

And as for Tariff's being included in the $450 price, Nintendo have denied this: Nintendo Says Tariffs Weren't Factored Into the $450 Price of the Switch 2