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I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet

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Re: I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet

#121

Post by marc_io »

yardie wrote: post #116
FabHK wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in India, that's the point: https://www.apple.com/in/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-se/ It is INR 43900, or around USD 570. ETA: In Brazil, it is BRL 4199 or USD 825. https://www.apple.com/br/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-se/ And that's at market exchange rates. Adjusted for purchasing power or wages it would be even more expensive, I assume.

Does Brazil still have a 100% tariffs on foreign made electronics? And the US charges almost none to highly favoured nations ie. China. So $429 iPhone in the US will be over $800 after duties in Brazil. And this is not set by Apple but the Brazilian authorities.

The taxes vary and are around 60% in the case of the iPhone.

We have the ICMS in São Paulo (18%), the national tax on industrialized products (IPI – 15%) and the tax on imports (II – 16%). In addition to them, there is still PIS (2.10%) and Cofins (9.65%).

Re: I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet

#122

Post by jecel »

andsbf wrote: post #71
dougSF70 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it referred to as Brazil Cost by economists. The only way to reduce the tariff is to manufacture locally. NOKIA did this and gained significant market share as a result 20+ years ago

I would say that the "Brazil cost" referred by the economists most probably means bribe.

The term "Brazil's cost" is about the legal overheads, which are much higher than anything due to corruption (which does, indeed, increase the cost of doing business).

The largest component is cascading taxes. There are some rules which allow you to get a discount on taxes of products you sell based on taxes of the components you bought, but in general each step in production and distribution will pay taxes on the incoming values including all previous taxes. That means that you look at a product in a store and think that the price includes 18% state taxes which doesn't sound so bad. But if you could trace it back through the supply chain all the way to mining the raw materials you would see that about 60% of the price is tax.

This, by the way, leads to the ironic situation where poor people pay way more taxes than rich ones even though the law is supposed to implement "progressive taxes". So the poor person is in the 0% income tax bracket but spends nearly everything they earn on stuff with hidden 60% taxes in them. The rich person is in the 35% income tax bracket but only a fraction of that income goes to products while much of their expenses have little to no taxes.

Other sources of "custo Brasil" are losses in transport due to bad infrastructure and crime, having to hire extra people to deal with complex regulations, costs due to delays and things like that.

Re: I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet

#124

Post by kylehotchkiss »

wtmt wrote: post #13

A few comments on this from an Indian perspective. Apple products are quite expensive here too, when compared against U.S. prices (plus sales tax). It may seem as if this is because of customs duties, but that’s not the entire story. Many companies tend to have geographically differentiated pricing to expand their market and make more money. Even if the prices aren’t completely matching the local currency equivalent…

I always know something with the customs/duty is off there when arriving in Delhi and seeing everybody with a brand new TV as their checked luggage :) Hopefully apple having stores in the country gives them better market visibility as I think the new SE is a fantastic phone for the Indian market. And remember to avoid buying the Dubai version of the iPhone as they turn off facetime (i had to live with this choice for 2 years)

Re: I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet

#125

Post by lotsofpulp »

cesarb wrote: post #112
giaour wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a labor cost to accepting cash (or, to a lesser extent, checks) that you don't incur when someone pays with a credit card. I recall reading some dubiously sourced research claiming that it costs most businesses more to accept cash than it does to take a credit card[0], which didn't seem that plausible, but it's probably closer to a wash than you would think. [0]: I think it was this: https://www.businesswire…

I have seen this argument a lot, but whenever I see a separate price for paying with cash versus paying with credit cards, the price for paying with cash is always lower.

Cash allows the merchant to pocket a lot more by evading taxes on the income.

The same mechanism works the opposite way for larger employers, where electronic payments cut losses from theft, and the costs required to prevent the thefts.

Re: I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet

#126

Post by dan-robertson »

throwamon wrote: post #55
dan-robertson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sentence looks plausible, but easy to misinterpret by reading it incorrectly. For example, I think most Apple device users are middle-income Americans or middle-high income people from other developed countries.

A Mac in Brazil costs literally 1 year worth of salary if you're poor, if you're lucky enough to have a source of income at all. Even as you go up the class hierarchy, most people are in debt (over 70% of families if I'm not mistaken). Edit: A Macbook Pro costs 3 years of minimum wage. https://themacindex.com/variants/MKGT3/macbook-pro-14-inch-m...

I think if one quickly reads the comment I replied to, one could think that most Apple devices are owned by people who are very rich compared to others in their country. I know I tripped up on that implication for example. However there are a lot more middle-income Europeans than very rich Brazilians so the actual balance of Apple users mostly come from the middle of a small number of rich countries rather than the top of a slightly larger number of small countries. For example if you counted each US state as a country, I think it would not be the case that ‘In most countries Apple's market is the top 1%’ so I think the statistic is mostly biased by the fact that the richer countries where most Apple devices are owned are very large countries and so their population is underweighted in a ‘proportion of countries’ statistic.

Re: I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet

#127

Post by lotsofpulp »

plorkyeran wrote: post #120
wil421 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP is full or crap or misinformed. Buyers almost never pay any fees for realtors in my area of the US. Unless the seller is trying to rip you off or something. Maybe it’s different on the west coast. Everyone I know who has bought a house (not selling) has the seller pay the commission. I bought a house 2 years ago and the seller didn’t have a realtor, he paid 3% to my realtor. It’s baked into the price, you don’t pa…

Where you do think the money for the commission comes from? Houses aren't a fixed-price good where you declare that you're selling a house for $500k and stick exactly to that price regardless of what you're offered. If a buyer without an agent to pay offers you $490k, that's a better offer than one with an agent offering you $500k if it means you don't have to pay that 3%, and the buyer has saved $10k by not having a…

No one is forced to use an agent or pay agent fees in the US.

Re: I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet

#128

Post by acchow »

> “Yeah, Apple’s products are pretty good, probably the best depending on what you need from them, but at the end of the day they are not that different from the cheaper alternatives and not really worth the extra money unless you have a lot to spare”. Which, it seems to me, is pretty much what you are going to hear from most people about Apple products anywhere in the world.

This could not be further from the truth. I imagine the number of people who think iPhones are the superior product outnumber the number of people who don't really care, and I'd be among them.

Re: I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet

#129

Post by acchow »

dhosek wrote: post #8

Even before I clicked the link, I was sure the answer was Brazil. It's not so much the taxes that raise the prices as the tariffs (which are kind of invisible taxes in that they are paid through higher prices rather than directly—which is part of what made a former president's boasting about raising tariffs somewhat absurd. It seemed he believed that the exporting country paid the price of the tariffs and not domesti…

> which are kind of invisible taxes in that they are paid through higher prices rather than directly—which is part of what made a former president's boasting about raising tariffs somewhat absurd. It seemed he believed that the exporting country paid the price of the tariffs and not domestic consumers in the form of higher prices

Depends on the tariffs. If done correctly, they can be used to protect a local industry in its infancy until it is mature enough to compete on the world stage (assuming you don't stifle its own innovation via these subsidies).

But in this case, Brazil wasn't making an iPhone/Mac competitor

Re: I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet

#130

Post by acchow »

wil421 wrote: post #103
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way houses in the US are sold looks insane from outside. When I last sold a house in the UK I paid the estate agent 1.5%, there were no buyers fees.

OP is full or crap or misinformed. Buyers almost never pay any fees for realtors in my area of the US. Unless the seller is trying to rip you off or something. Maybe it’s different on the west coast. Everyone I know who has bought a house (not selling) has the seller pay the commission. I bought a house 2 years ago and the seller didn’t have a realtor, he paid 3% to my realtor. It’s baked into the price, you don’t pa…

>OP is full or crap or misinformed. Buyers almost never pay any fees for realtors in my area of the US

I think you've missed the point of this comment thread. Head up to great-great-great-grandparent comment:

"IME this is one of the most common economic misconceptions that people have, to think that the economic cost of a tax is borne by whoever nominally pays it. Most people with no economics background will for example think that it's just companies that pay salary related taxes, or consumers who pay VAT. Those are both true in the accounting sense that the money is paid by those respective parties to the government but not in the economic sense of who would have the extra money if there were no tax."

Elsewhere in the thread is the example of credit card feeds which technically are paid for by the merchant, but economically are paid for by the consumers.

Now try to carry these concepts to your Real Estate Agent scenario. I shall leave that as an exercise.

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