There’s an interesting new update on the news that Switch 2 is facing down some severe tariffs.
Yesterday, we shared a report from Japanese news outlet Nikkei. Nikkei’s source, a component supplier for Apple and Nintendo, claimed that Nintendo could be facing tariffs of as much as 145 %.
Today, video game industry analyst David Gibson shared a surprising objection to that story. He made this statement on Twitter:
“”The majority of Switch consoles are made in China, Nikkei Asia has learned, with a relatively small proportion made in Vietnam.”- this is just not true. @AsiaNikkei if you did some real checking you would find this out.”
It’s certainly not common to see comments like these between media outlets, but if you are an industry professional like Gibson, you would be in the right position to correct news reports, especially if they’re speading what you know to be misinformation.
Gibson hasn’t elaborated further. So, we don’t know if, for example, Nintendo has more capacity to build Switch 2 consoles in Vietnam than in China. Or, for example, if he meant that the sum total of factories outside China has more capacity to build Switch 2 consoles than those in China.
What we did report previously that we know to be true is that tech companies, that do include Sony and Microsoft alongside Nintendo, have made moves to transition part of their manufacturing to outside China, and the same is also true of Apple, Samsung, and others.
The tech industry already anticipated that a situation similar to what we are seeing today could happen someday, and that was the reason for these preparations. But there were honest questions on how far those efforts have gone, because the low manufacturing costs that were China’s edge in the global industry still remain true.
In any case, Gibson’s statement implies that Nintendo may be fully capable of supplying the US market, potentially the biggest market for the Switch 2, without worrying about tariffs. Or at the very least, if tariffs will have a general effect of making everything more expensive as it artificially raises inflation, the Switch isn’t actually directly targeted as we all thought it would be.
With all of this said, the US government could remove all this worry if they made changes to their tariff policies. While it would be easy to say they should just add video games to the tariff exceptions, they could just as easily take back those tariffs altogether. But with that in mind, we’re going to see how prepared Nintendo actually is to deal with these tariffs and potential new supply issues.
