A sad state of affairs for the UK Economy

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tom66

Joined May 9, 2009
2,595
Heard of Raspberry Pi?

They were considering making it in the UK, but it turns out it's more tax efficient to make it in China/Taiwan. You actually pay lower import taxes by importing manufactured boards, than the individual components to make them.

I’d like to draw attention to one cost in particular that really created problems for us in Britain. Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK – with all of those components soldered onto it – it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that it’s really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and it’s one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. It’s an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things, and it’s an issue we’ve taken up with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
To me that sounds ridiculous.

I want to eventually make my Super OSD project in the UK, but it's looking less and less viable - especially the way the government are going.

In other news, I'm going to get a Raspberry Pi to replace/supplement my media PC. It's fanless, draws less than 3W (1.5W typically), and can play 1080p - whereas my media PC has 3 fans, draws around 150W, and struggles to play 1080p. (That's just ridiculous, how can a 700 MHz ARM low power processor outperform a 2.8 GHz AMD x64?!)
 

Adjuster

Joined Dec 26, 2010
2,148
Nothing can surprise me in this field. In my country we have for a long time been plagued by a very poor attitude towards industry. This is something which will need to change if we don't want to go the same way as some of our European neighbours.

On the whole I think it will improve - eventually, but it took a long time for us to get where we are now, and there is a lot of inertia to overcome. I see it also rather as a generational issue: some of the processes which have led where we are now have been in play for a generation or more, and it seems natural that people who are now coming into their most active years will be more able to break the mould than their predecessors were.

Some of the attitudes against productive effort and compared to running a bunch of banks are pretty entrenched though. In my opinion part of this is comes from a traditional snobbishness, while some of has a basis in power struggles which unfortunately can't be described here, as they are based in party politics.
 

spinnaker

Joined Oct 29, 2009
7,830
A number of the medical device manufacturers will be going offshore to avoid paying the taxes that come with out new HC system.
 
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