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Nintendo Puts Business In Brazil On Hiatus
jones_supa writes: Nintendo has announced that it will end distribution of its consoles and games in Brazil. In a statement, Nintendo attributed the move to high import duties, which makes doing feasible business difficult. The company could avoid those duties with a local manufacturing operation, but has chosen not to establish one, presumably for the costs involved. In a statement e-mailed to Polygon, Nintendo of America said that the company's distributor for Latin America would no longer send products to Brazil, but it would continue to distribute Nintendo goods to other parts of South America. Nintendo will also keep monitoring the evolution of the business environment in Brazil and evaluate how to best serve Brazilian customers in the future.
Kind of hard to debate to go more free when your neighbors are vastly more poor with zero taxes. Wouldn't it be easier to go Uruguay or Venezuela?
The US too lost and still the middle class never has recovered from NAFTA. Wages have not increased in 20 years regardless of inflation! The US can argue it will benefit CEOs and lobbyists as the companies are at least owned here. Not true for Brazil so cutting taxes would only cut your revenue as nothing is based there.
http://saveie6.com/
It doesn't matter if the taxes and tariffs in Brazil are set at 0%, 50%, 100% or even 1000%, it wont do a thing to encourage electronic manufacturing in the country. In fact, I suspect there is nothing that the Brazilian government could do that would get electronic manufacturers to build product there short of dropping wages and other costs low enough to make building there (instead of building in super-low-labor-cost countries like China) viable.
I was thinking of a similar experiment -- if a company refuses to sell a product in your country, then it loses all copyright / trademark / patent protection. Locals would then be free to open up shop and start making the hardware or copying the software. I'm not sure if this would work, but I'd be interested in seeing the result nonetheless.
Ok let me get this straight.
1. Put into place a law that lets you steal the patents of products not being sold in your country ....
2. Raise Tariffs on said products to the point they can't be sold
3.
4. Hope your military is sufficient to deter retaliation from the countries you have been robbing ?
Now admittedly a military response maybe a little much. At the very least you can certainly expect the other nations to go after your assets abroad, pursue economic retaliation, hell they could issues letters of mark and reprisal against your merchant shipping.
The problem is this doesn't serve them well. Trying to recreate the rest of the worlds industries internally just insures they have many second rate products, or have to pay hefty premiums for the tools they need to get things done. Really surprising after all these years they haven't tried to emulate more successful models, ala Japan, Singapore or Taiwan and encourage their industries to pursue ventures where they can have a competitive advantage.
And yet, day after day, post after post, we see people here on /. advocate that US at least be able to manufacturer everything locally, to reduce dependency on foreign tech, to reduce brain-drain to foreign manufacturing, etc, etc, etc.
Then we see a country try and do that. And we tell them its wrong...
I realize /. is of course many people and many opinions... but I wonder how many people were reading your post nodding; while simultaneously thinking the US should be producing more locally, despite the competitive advantages of outsourcing the manufacturing (which is precisely is why we do it.)
In a statement e-mailed to Polygon, Nintendo of America said that the company's distributor for Latin America would no longer send products to Brazil, but it would continue to distribute Nintendo goods to other parts of South America.
So in other words, Nintendo's legitimate subsidiary cannot compete with gray-market smugglers who evade the tariff to bring in consoles and games from the neighboring countries.
So they're just going to pull out and let the smugglers be their de-facto distribution channel.