This year forget buying your tech in the post-Christmas sales. Because a 20 per cent increase in Chinese minimum wage is gonna hike up electronics prices come January.
In fact, the increase is only hitting the Guangdong province of China. Doesn’t sound too big a deal, right?
Wrong. Because that one province has been the making of China. As a result, it’s filled with big electronics firms and state-owned companies, as well as plenty of smaller and medium-sized private firms. That means it accounts for a huge share of Chinese industrial output. It also makes it hugely influential, and means the rest of China is sure to follow suit and raise wages across the board.
The knock-on effect is that anything made in China is going to get more expensive — and that means most of the gadgets you’re planning on buying are gonna get pricier, too.
While some companies might just relocate, manufacturing products in poorer countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia, that won’t help too much. Because while there are cheap workers elsewhere, the scale of workforce can’t match that of China’s.
This comes on the back of Western Digital’s Thailand factory being flooded, creating a jump in hard drive prices.
The hard truth is that things are going to get more expensive. Best stockpile before the holidays, then.
Image: Robert S. Donovan