Last week, we reported that PlayStation 4 will cost the equivalent of 1,800 U.S. Dollars in Brazil. It’s a stupefyingly exorbitant price, but apparently, there’s good reason for it: a great deal of import fees and taxes are being levied against Sony Computer Entertainment America in the process of shipping PS4s to Brazil.
The details were given in a highly transparent manner by Sony Latin America general manager Mark Stanley on the official Brazilian PlayStation Blog. In a translation of the post, via Polygon, Stanley explains that the mark-up from 858 Brazilian Real Dollars to R$ 3,999 is entirely owed to various import taxes and distributor fees, all detailed in the chart below. Note that, after all is said and done, Sony is still discounting the price after taxes and fees by R$ 258, which means the console itself is technically cheaper in Brazil than in North America. Unfortunately, Latin American customers are footing other bills.
It’s not surprising that Sony is raising the price of the console in Brazil to compensate for these ridiculous fees–they’d be losing an awful amount of money on every unit sold if they didn’t. It’s more troubling that this situation exists to begin with, though Stanley notes that Sony is thinking about establishing PS4 manufacturing operations in Latin America to compensate. For reference, the PS3 was imported to Brazil until local manufacturing began in May 2013.