Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Trump to pull US out of postal treaty
The US has announced plans to withdraw from a 144-year-old postal treaty, which the White House says lets China ship goods at unfairly low prices.
Under the treaty, a UN body sets lower international rates for packages from certain countries, a move originally designed to support poorer nations.
But the US says the discounts put American businesses at a disadvantage.
Officials said they hoped the notice of withdrawal would set the stage to agree a better deal.
"We're looking for a fair system," a senior administration official told reporters. "We do hope that ultimately we achieve a negotiated outcome."
The BBC's Asia business correspondent Karishma Vaswani says the move to pull out of the treaty is aimed at forcing the Chinese to give up the developing nation status they had when they first entered the pact back in 1969.
[...] The process of withdrawing from the treaty takes at least a year and the White House said it would be willing to remain in the UPU if negotiations were successful.
The US Postal Service and companies such as Amazon and FedEx have complained about the discounts for foreign shippers for many years.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday October 21 2018, @06:03PM (2 children)
It's not all or nothing. Depending on the size of the factory and the volume of its various outputs, some parts will be sourced by the bargeload and some by the China Post E-Packet.
The proportion of barge to packet will have a lot to do with how affected the hypothetical factory is, but I don't think it's right to pretend that no one will be affected just because many products are sourced by high-volume components.
Products that are closer to "niche products" than "mass market" are an area in which American factories can try to get America back into manufacturing (because of the high cost of entry and low profit margins for manufacturing mass market goods), and those are the ones most likely to be affected.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday October 21 2018, @06:19PM (1 child)
If they're getting by on a low enough volume that they're getting parts by post, the item is either already expensive, high margin, or a small part of a larger business.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday October 22 2018, @02:44PM
Yup...and in that case this could actually be beneficial for them.
As you said, if they're getting parts by post, it's pretty low volume. If it's that low volume, it's probably not worth investing in huge amounts of automated manufacturing. There's a lot of test or scientific instrumentation like that which is still manufactured in the US. So it's massively expensive, largely due to labor costs. They've gotta be hand manufactured, and since they're low volume and high cost they're probably high precision which means you need the guy building it to actually have a clue what he's doing. And the people buying it aren't trying to cut every last cent off the cost either, they expect it to be an expensive piece of equipment.
So suppose you're paying someone ten bucks to solder on a twenty cent part which now just became a fifty cent part. An increase of three tenths of a percent compared only to the total labor cost. Who gives a fuck?
On the other hand, there's probably still someone in China manufacturing similar instruments, but since the completed instrument is bigger and more expensive, it costs more to ship, and that cost will probably increase by a greater amount. The only way the domestic assembler loses is if they're buying damn near every single part from China by post. Which would seem to be pretty stupid.