Why PC Builders Should Stock Up on Components Now

NZXT is a popular PC desktop case vendor, but the California-based company recently had to raise its prices.

- Michael Kan

The reason? The new US tariffs on Chinese imports include PC cases. In September, the Trump administration imposed the 10 percent duty, which also covers motherboards, graphics cards, and CPU coolers from the country. As a result, NZXT had to introduce a 10 percent price increase on PC cases to deal with the added costs, VP Jim Carlton told PCMag in an interview.

And building a PC could get even more expensive in 2019; US tariffs on Chinese-made goods will rise from 10 percent to 25 percent in January.

“If I needed to build a system in the next six months, I’d definitely build it before the end of the year,” Carlton told us.

FOOTING THE BILL

For PC builders, the tariffs risk adding a few hundred dollars to the total cost of components for a custom desktop. “If it’s a $2,000 purchase on 25 percent tariffs, it’s going to be a $2,500 purchase,” Carlton said. “So we are very concerned with the direction of where this is going.”

“I don’t have a 10 percent [profit] margin I can just throw away and absorb the tariffs,” he added. “And certainly no one has a margin for 25 percent.”

But retail consumers won’t be the only buyers affected by the tariffs. MBX Systems is another US provider of hardware systems, which focuses on enterprise customers. The Illinois-based company specializes in assembling servers, which are then resold by its clients, such as cybersecurity firms.

Last month, the company told its customers the bad news: More than 30 component suppliers—including Intel, Samsung, and Seagate—had been affected by the tariffs, forcing server component costs to go up.