Quote Originally Posted by JJJ View Post
Okay. So what do Hasbro Australia say when they are asked about this gross disparity?
You have to understand that Hasbro America is the toy company... Hasbro Australia is just a branch office like in most other countries, that is allowed to import and distribute their products, to not only make a profit for the local (Australian) office to pay for their expenses (including staff and marketing), but they also have to include profit that goes back to Hasbro America. Because Hasbro America is not going to have millions of its products sold in other countries each year and not make any money from them.
If you look at Hasbro America's quarterly reports, they include an "international revenue" component in their own revenue/profit amounts. That's the percentage of money they get off everything sold in other countries to retailers, which is on top of what those products have to sell for to make a profit to those non-American local distributors.

So if a Deluxe toy in America has a 40% profit margin when they sell it to an American retailer, it has to have a similar profit margin in non-American countries on top of the 40% profit margin that the local branch has to charge the local retailers for their own profits/operating costs.... which essentially doubles the price difference between what it cost to manufacture an item in Asia to what the product sells for (wholesale) to retailers in non-American countries, compared to what American retailers are charged (wholesale).

I've done the calculations in the past and it actually has very little to do with import taxes, corporate taxes and GST, as both countries have various duties and taxes that can be factored in, and the difference between Australia and America per item below a certain dollar value is quite negligible.
The significant difference comes down to the "commission" that goes back to Hasbro America from every Hasbro product sold in every non-American country like ours.


One thing that I can't get an explanation for though, is the significant price difference of Japanese exclusive items that we get here through Hasbro Asia (in Hong Kong). Those items are sold to retailers in Asia so cheaply that they are half the price at retail over there in places like Hong Kong, than they are here.... as if the wholesale price here is more than the retail price over there. It has nothing to do with shipping costs to Australia because we sometimes get non-Japanese items from Hasbro Asia that end up being similarly priced here at retail as over there (which means a similar wholesale price). You'd think that one branch of Hasbro (HK) would do a special deal for another branch of Hasbro (AUS) to make the stock cheaper for going to a "fellow branch of Hasbro", instead of charging them double what they charge the toy retailers that have no relationship to Hasbro.