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 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?!)
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.
To me that sounds ridiculous.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.
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?!)