We Regret but Have to Temporarily Suspend the Shipments to USA
Original: We regret but have to temporary suspend the shipments to USA
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As Olimex suspends shipments to the US, a lively debate erupts over why some shippers continue to deliver while others struggle. Commenters point out that larger companies like Mouser and Digikey have dedicated import/export teams and customs brokers, giving them an edge in navigating complex tariffs and regulations. The discussion reveals that some companies are using strategies like shipping via boats, utilizing bonded warehouses, and leveraging volume discounts to circumvent the challenges. It turns out that having the right logistics expertise and infrastructure can make all the difference in getting goods across borders.
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Is this a situation where if you abide by the letter of the law without tech it doesn’t work, where if you use software and/or route through nations that already have no tariff deals with US you get your items through?
I just bought (last week) an EEG kit from Europe to US for personal sleep studies. It has similar metals that you indicate. There was no issue in my shipper getting it through. There was no tariff added. There was no certificate of analysis.
> Mouser and Digikey have the same issues, but have professional import customs brokers and do these import procedures and handle all these charges by themselves. The average small US customer have no clue how to do import, they wait someone to deliver their parcel to their door. Which now do not happens, and after several weeks of this parcel hanging at US customs they ask the seller “where is my parcel? I ordered this way many times and every time the parcel arrived to my door” meantime they have to pay import taxes, storage fees etc etc and they simple refuse the parcel and return it back. This is why DHL and UPS refuse to take parcels to USA now until they figure out how to calculate these import tariffs correctly so they can be pre-paid in advance i.e. the US customer knows what he have to pay $$$ tariffs in advance and all these returns stop.
I seriously wonder if Digikey lost money on that order, shipping alone must have cost 20-30€, and on top come all the antistatic bags, handling costs, payment costs.
Or...they have a warehouse in Germany?
all these single-piece mini packages
Automated pick-and-package.
Digi-key never offerred free shipping for US customers and now we will have to pay these high tariffs too.
Combine that with a stupidly efficient order picking process, and I wouldn't be surprised if they basically break even on small orders.
You've got to remember that those small one-off orders are almost always for industrial prototyping. You don't need to make a lot of money selling 5 units for a hand-assembled prototype when you know you will be selling them 500 units for the initial automated run, or even 50.000 units for the final production run.
Additionally, there's a lot of value in being a one-stop-shop: they might not make a lot of money on small-quantity low-volume items, but if an engineer can purchase their entire BOM from you at once, she is unlikely to go looking for a competitor to save a few bucks on the higher-margin items.
Boats. They're still dealing with tariffs, but it's a lot easier to declare an entire container than individual airmail packets.
But having a US presence that can then receive the containers and ship domestically, is kindof reserved for the big boys.
I think if the shipper can't determine the amount of copper in their products, then neither can customs.
From TFA: "U.S. customs is demanding a Certificate of Analysis (which could cost thousands of dollars and to determine what exact amount of Aluminum, Copper and Steel are in the product), otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product. "
They WANT you to pay the full 100% in taxes.
> U.S. customs is demanding a Certificate of Analysis (which could cost thousands of dollars and to determine what exact amount of Aluminum, Copper and Steel are in the product), otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product
Customs doesn't have to. They can simply decide you haven't followed the rules, and it'll be up to you to prove you haven't or face paying fines/losing a shipment/possible prosecution. And they can decide the playing field: can you be wrong by 10% on that copper estimate? 1%? 0.001%? Good luck.
(FWIW I assume this was a language barrier issue leading to a misunderstanding, perhaps with a customer service rep that didn't review my past messages. I don't think DeepComputing intended to trick me.)
Wow this administration is f**ing batshit insane. I thought the tariffs would be on raw metals, not anything at all that happens to contain them.
> U.S. customs is demanding a Certificate of Analysis (which could cost thousands of dollars and to determine what exact amount of Aluminum, Copper and Steel are in the product), otherwise they assume the entire PCB consists of copper, aluminum, and steel, and charge a 100% tariff on the whole product. This is a prime example of unnecessary complexity in international trade.
Also why would they go through all that trouble? Easier to not sell there anymore.
I don't agree with it, but isn't that ostensibly the end goal? That is, to force/encourage the manufacturing of goods in the US, rather than importing them. Of course, the metal itself still needs to enter the US either way.
If this was a serious economic policy, it would have started small—perhaps a 5% tariff, to take effect in six months. Then, promise to ramp it up (say an additional 5% every year).
E.g. if he wanted to tariff electronic devices, why not tariff them directly, instead of those weird mental gymnastics?
There are two mutually exclusive stated goals. One is, as you said, onshoring tech manufacturing to the USA [1]. The other stated goal is to eliminate income tax and replace it with income from tariffs [2][3]. To play these out on their own terms: if the first goal succeeds, then import volume would drop, and total tariff income would be too low to replace income taxes. If the first goal fails, then tariff income would be high enough to replace income taxes. IDK I haven't done the napkin math and I suspect neither have they.
[1]: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trump-says-his-tariffs-...
[2]: https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/trump-proposes-abolishment...
[3]: https://www.foxbusiness.com/video/6371514396112
Going with Fox Business links to avoid accusations of bias.
This seems like it could also lead to absurd situations. If a device contained both, would customs pretend it was simultaneously 100% made out of copper and 100% made out of steel and apply both tariffs?
Yes, because it benefits the “here’s how much extra revenue our copper tariffs generate in 2025” sound bites for the Administration to tout (even if they are fabricated numbers based on nonsensical assumptions.)
Furthermore as I know customs, the moment you will start making stuff up in a too brazen way, they will just use Google, search some average price of products and use that instead what you are declaring.
Sometimes it looks like they are getting a cut from amount of tariff they successfully scalp from you.
Losing a significant proportion of their revenue can easily bring down plenty of businesses.
It's also fair for a company to say 'f- that, even just doing that eats away at our bottom line, we'll concentrate on more profitable markets' (which is the intention I guess. Go and build it in USA,USA,USA).
Olimex sells kits, kits made by others.
They don't know how much copper is in the MPS430F5438 because Texas Instruments made the MPS430F5438.
The problem isn't creating a reasonable estimate, anyone can do that. Most cheap consumer PCBs are going to be 2-layer FR4 with 1oz/sq. ft. of copper, minus some etched away, with negligible copper in parts like chips. That indeed should get you fairly close.
But there are also 32-layer PCBs, and even PCBs with a solid copper core. And your PCB could be filled with copper inductors! Similarly, it could also be a solid aluminum-core PCB. If I were a malicious customs officer, I would insist that the only valid upper bound is a 100% copper PCB, which is also 100% aluminum, and 100% whatever else. Don't want to pay that? No problem, just provide a certified lab analysis report!
Simple things rapidly get complicated when the goal is to frustrate the process as much as possible. You don't live in a modern economy focused on global trade anymore, you are now living in a Kafka book.
There's your problem. It enables selective enforcement, because the authorities can decide at any time "if you're off by 0.1% we'll consider you in violation".
No, it is not insane. This creates perfect "everyone violates the law, we can selectively enforce it" scenario. That's how 10% Intel-like condition can be created for other companies.
("History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes," attributed to Twain)
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/
- Abraham Lincoln, 1868
So if you think the law is bullshit the judge can just say you probably won't be prosecuted so you have no imminent fear of prosecution and you can't challenge it.
So if a single prosecution (including your own) under the relevant section occurred at any time in the decade prior, that's likely enough to argue standing to challenge that section, provided the other tests of standing are met.
So as long as they only taser your dogs, flashbang your family home, take millions in inventory it's all good as long as there wasn't a successful prosecution and thus there is no standing?
They don't need to actually toss people in prison to get compliance. Tasing their dogs and destroying their business is enough, using an unchallengeable law.
This stuff is not so shocking any more!!!
There is no logic to it, it’s make believe for the narrative machine.
Price I pay is not getting my $20 fairy lights that made my backyard look cute. The price foreign factory workers pay is that they’re out of a job. I don’t think Americans pay the most, but they do pay.
Edit: Clearly people are missing the point Im trying to make here. I’m trying to address the viewpoint that Americans will somehow lose the most, which i don’t think is the case. This isn’t a pro tariff argument. American consumer is the biggest market there is on the planet. Pretending we can just find other buyers is ludicrous. Yes, there will be some jobs affected domestically, but that number will be much higher elsewhere.
Yes, the the cost of (at least) some foreign workers is that the jobs they had creating good exported to America will go away. That's true. The trade-off though isn't just that the Americans don't get their stuff. The real trade off is that the good those factory workers buy (whether they be physical or immaterial, cultural or financial services) will not get bought. Americans making those good will therefore ALSO be out of a job.
In the end, nobody gets what they want and everybody loses employment. It's a lose/lose for everybody involved.
The US is treating everyone else like shit and isolating themselves from the world.
The world is slowly esponding accordingly and reconfiguring to the new reality where the US is unreliable and unfriendly.
While it's a lose/lose this will ultimately hurt the US more than everyone else.
The world isn't going to come to the aid of the US and prop them back up to their place of hegemony when this all goes to shit. The rest of the world is going to pick at the carcass of what was once an inspirational empire.
What I don't like is when we start using the terminology if "winning" a trade war. A trade war, like an actual war, has no winners. We are all going to be poorer, both materially and culturally, from hurting each other.
So yes, the current American administration (which is currently a legitimate democratic representation of the American people) has started a trade war meant to inflict pain on everybody that doesn't align with them. The answer to that isn't "well actually the trade war is going to backfire and the whole world is going to be stronger than you" its "you're going to pay for this too. However much you hurt us, and it is non-zero, you are also going to hurt yourself. Not because I'm going to hurt you, but because we are all part of one system of trade".
Yes, I've read that inspiration in the Mein Kamph. Hitler cited the US's hatred, slavery, and Jim Crow for how Germany responded to the Jewish problem.
If you were a WASP - white anglo-saxon protestant, you were fine. Elsewise, yeah, not so much.
I read it more as decentering the United States, which frankly I'm completely, 100% for. America's (lack of) culture has been our biggest export. We've sanitized vast swathes of the globe into our hollow consumerist self image at great cost to interesting and beautiful places. All products are designed with Americans in mind, because Americans were the center of global trade. If you wanted to make money, you had to sell your thing to Americans.
And, worse, Americans have grown accustomed to this deference and preferential treatment. It's time we got a reality check: that the world doesn't need us anymore. That we've become as old, dumb and worthless as the shitty president that so perfectly embodies our culture of consumption, waste, and useless greed.
In this case, though, I would imagine that lightly waterproofed decorative outdoor lighting would sell about equally well to any first or second world market.
I’m wondering if some of them are wide but shallow, and that they have a much smaller total consumption quotient available.
America's average net salary is $53,000 and Portugal's is US$19,000.
If your TV factory can't ship to America for the time being, you might need to retool and make more 43" screens and fewer 85" screens. You'd prefer to be making the higher margin products, but at least you keep work coming in and keep your workers fed.
The US was a unique money-making machine... Although the gears seem to be getting looser and the machine is being broken. Personally I think the US economy is flexible enough to mitigate much of the damage, however I worry about the future impact of political changes.
I'm in New Zealand which is quite wealthy although the demographic timebomb will go off in next decades: and our economy is also fucked because our voters hate businesses and business people.
One strong signal of how fucked a country is economically, is how well small businesses can survive.
If the US starts screwing its businesses more, that is the time to worry.
Meaning that for a lot of businesses, especially those that manufacture goods US is often a very important and hard to replace market.
e.g. What do you think will happen to the profit margins of EU drug companies if Trump actually imposed his tariffs on pharmaceuticals? Besides the size of the US market they also generally charge much higher prices there.
The EU is making moves right now to position itself as the preeminent center of world trade.
Losing that position will hurt Americans more than anyone else.
The EU being what it is considering to start planning to make a plan to take moves to plan these moves.
Then it will have to align those plans with all its members etc.
You can’t have both..
Once that's complete and the dependence on the US is broken, expect more dramatic moves.
I can’t wait to see what will happen when German auto industry crashes. It will be a very very interesting domino fall. Unfortunately I’ll watch it from inside, so it won’t be fun, but it will be interesting nonetheless.
Export markets will of course collapse outside of the very high-end. But that has been slowly occurring over the last few years anyway.
I think there will be even stronger trend of european brands put on Chinese made cars. Like Renault is already doing with Dacia Spring. Brands themselves will survive, even companies themselves may survive, but many of them may be just headquarters. Moving production means supply chain follows. And that's where most of the jobs are. Over time R&D will follow factories. So for the job market it could be pretty close to full-on crash.
Because they believed the actually had a chance of remaining competitive in the Chinese market.
Turns out that was highly delusional in hindsight.
It generally punches below its geopolitical weight, but that’s because it was happy to follow the US when American policies were decent (not great, but good for trade and mostly good for stability). But that’s not a law of nature, things do change, even if it is slow compared to the modern news cycle.
At the same time, there are things to keep in mind:
- this is asking member-states to delegate some of their sovereignty, which is never all easy and always involves quite a bit of horse-trading
- the member-states are perfectly happy to fuck things up on their own and things like growth figures for the eurozone actually mask very different realities depending on the country and its government
- stagnation is a very western point of view, things are still changing quite a lot on the eastern side
- the reference point should be the same situation without the EU. I am not sure, for example, that things would be improved with a trade war between Germany and France, the baltics fending off for themselves, or each country having its own import requirements and sets of tariffs.
I do also strongly believe that the Eurozone or a rather a monetary union without a fiscal union hasn’t been the best idea as far as south-north goes.
And then you have countries which are doing quite well despite retaining their free-floating currency.
They existed long before the EU was called the EU, but that is misleading.
Both the customs union and the common market were created in 1957 with the European economic community, which got a new name and a coat of paint to become the EU in 1993. Both are fundamental parts of the European project. They would not exist without the EU and the EU would not exist without them.
Poland is an interesting case in that you can retain a free floating currency and your own monetary policy and still do quite well.
That tiny German company making lab equipment which happens to be absolutely essential for your company? Their shipments aren't getting through customs anymore, and dealing with the additional paperwork is way more than the two-and-a-half people in charge of shipping can handle on top of their regular duties. The US is only 5% of their market, so rather than drown in an attempt to serve the US they'll just suspend shipping until the US fixes itself, and serve the other 95% of the world instead.
Can't do your job without a replacement MacGuffin? Oh well, sucks to be you! Not our problem that your company is going to lose millions, take it up with your government.
I highly doubt these kinds of companies will reduce their prices once the tariff is gone resulting in a permanent higher cost of products made with these machines in the US.
The EU is the top trading partner for 80 countries. By comparison, the US is the top trading partner for a little over 20 countries. The EU is the world’s largest trader of manufactured goods and services.
The EU is a single market.
That is all of your imports that are impacted by tariffs? Whatever it is that you are smoking is some good stuff.
It does seem like these tariffs haven't really been thought through though, so I wouldn't be surprised if "hacks" existed.
For example, the US has some of the largest lithium deposits in the world, but it's not being exploited because extraction is dirty and polluting, generally the compliance for opening a new mine is very complex (takes 7-10 years), and catching-up on refinery capacity will take an enormous investment (China does almost all Li refining now).
Similarly, developing the techniques to boost oil extraction (fracking, EOR...) took significant and sustained government support of different kinds until it became competitive, it's unclear if market pressure alone would have done it. This made the US again into the largest exporter rather than the largest importer of oil.
There are many such cases.
Note: I'm not from the US, and I'm not particularly pro-US, I'm not saying that tariffs are a good mechanism to support these industries, and I'm not necessarily in favour of such anti-environmental policies. But those are the facts as I understand them.
If the US has a ton of Lithium but finds it too expensive to extract, why not buy it now while it's cheap, wait for it to become rarer in other countries so more expensive, and only extract it once it's worth it (or close to worth it)?
But these things take time and significant capital to develop, you often need to be non-competitive for years, doing things in a more expensive way, until you can catch-up. But then you can overtake everyone else, if nothing else due to the momentum of growth and the higher efficiency you had to maintain to catch-up. Just like it happened with oil in the US, or with Germany, Japan, Korea or China recovering from catastrophe.
If you don't do this, you can get cornered, where in principle you can produce a resource much more efficiently in your country, but you can't quite climb over the hill because you are addicted to depending on others as an economy and you don't anymore have the capital, know-how or culture for such things.
It's the same reason why all the manufacturing outsourcing was so short-sighted. Sure, you're saving a few bucks on labor, but you are literally giving away all your knowledge about the manufacturing process! Those local factory workers you are firing? They won't be around to train new workers when you want to restart the local factory a decade or three later. Meanwhile, the factories overseas haven't been sitting idle either and have kept developing their manufacturing processes. They will not give you their trade secrets so you're going to have to reinvent the wheel yourself - without experts.
Congratulations, you have created your own competitor, and they are now better than you.
It's important to get news from politically unbiased sources, because the reality is that US lithium sources are being stood up! Especially in that politically incorrect state of California which is supposedly a hellhole that would never approve something of the sort.
As for tariffs being a good way to support these industries citation needed! It's exactly the opposite type of policy for driving the investment that's needed. It's actually drastically collapsing all of the massive investment that was happening under Biden, in a complete disaster for the US. So I totally agree that you are not pro-US, but let's be honest about the disaster of tariffs.
Closest I can think of is the Romans required a constant influx of cheap labour from outside their empire for their economy. When the flow stopped (diminished conquering meant diminished number of slaves coming in) that was a major factor in economic decline.
There's really no reason why we shouldn't have steel mills aside from that.
What's more likely, as I stated in another comment, is if you destroy their comparative advantage at a tariffed industry, the Chinese guy that had the steel mill as his best option now has to move to the next even shittier one. Tariffs are usually economically worse than zero-sum.
To answer the broader question, if you believe in markets at all, then demand creates supply, and supply for cheap (and therefore abused) labor is arguably at least in part responsible for economies like China being so shitty to your average worker. If all Western countries would e.g. slap tariffs on goods imported from places with poor labor rights, but they were specifically contingent on that (and not just a list of countries that our Great Leader has a problem with), that would put the pressure on the Chinese government to raise the standards to remain competitive. That would be the kind of tariff I would support, and I don't buy the argument that if we don't allow for such shitty jobs, the alternatives would be even worse - this is exactly the kind of attitude that creates a global race to the bottom that is the major driver for enshittification all around.
It is consistently frustrating to me to read so many analyses mentioning "comparative advantage" when what they mean is "minute labor protections compared to American standards". Americans can't freely compete when others who sell labor and goods in their marketplaces don't have to follow any of the same rules.
1) We will tariff the Chinese to make it unprofitable to sell to America anything built using anything other than our self-imposed regulations.
2) When more American steel plants etc are built, assuming investors even believe the tariffs will exist through enough administration to make it profitable, they magically will somehow be safer than working in the other industries these workers were pulled from, and magically not continue to be one of the more dangerous occupations in the USA that for mysterious reasons we want more people risking their hides in.
Reality:
1) Chinese do the same thing as always, and sell to the other 95% of the world, with no labor condition changes for the chinese.
2) More Americans get their arms turned into molten lava instead of Chinese (see recent Clairton plant explosion, yay for building more of that?). So labor conditions degrade for Americans.
3) Other Chinese figure out how to game the system enough to pretend they've followed the same rules, because lets be real, "the king is far away and the mountains are large."
4) The few Chinese not manufacturing for the other 95% of earth and haven't figured out how to game the system, are fired and work at the next even shittier job they passed on the way to the steel mill.
If you want tariff that option away from a bunch of China-men, have them do the next even shittier dangerous job that they bypassed on the way to the steel mill, and then save them while you instead work next to molten iron, that's the proposition you're moving towards.
Of course if you want a little taste of being that hero, there are domestic steel mills currently hiring, you can take that job so the next guy in line won't get maimed. But somehow I think you won't, so you must be "all cool" they are "instead maimed."
I'm not sure what you're arguing for here, but you come off as morally bankrupt. Worker safety can certainly be improved but people like you happily shrug it off and are fine with hazardous cost cutting which allows people to continue to be maimed as long as you're steel or whatever is super cheap.
It's reasons why this that I refuse to associate with Republicans in my daily life anymore. They are undeserving of respect or decency for how they continue to make our lives worse.
These are not the only two options. Considering the source is always relevant and worthy of comment.
Tabloid trash publications like the NY Post are not honest messengers, but rather seek to amplify things like this using synecdoche to suggest that they're representative of the median Democrat. If the poster above wanted to showcase the underlying ideas, they could have just linked to the Third way website and paraphrased their argument directly, but instead they decided to share the gutter press version. I discount tabloid newspapers the same way I discount left-leaning outlets like Democracy Now! or Truthout - they might be right some of the time but the general level of bias outweighs their utility as providers of factual information, which is readily available from less biased sources.
Would you agree that Third Way’s positions and suggestions should be weighted differently than official federal government stances and actions?
you want to pay more in taxes for everything because you dont like the high standards democrats have for themselves?
some democrats also want to raise taxes? why not support them if you eant to raise taxes?
- new regulation changing trade in a way that companies are struggling to follow
is child's play compared to
- a memo from a think-tank suggesting a particular choice of words
?
It's not the most productive but for all the pain their "opinions" create, the least I can do is make them feel the group believes their opinions to be ridiculous as the group all laughs.
I don't think they should get civility outside of the voters booth if they're uncivil within the booth.
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