The dropping Euro/US-Dollar exchange rate has put many large companies under pressure to increase their prices for European customers, including giants like Apple.
Unfortunately, the situation now affects the sim racing community as well as Fanatec has announced to increase prices in their European webshop by 20% – 30%. As explained below, the situation is affecting Fanatec heavily as their production process abroad has become significantly more expensive, with production costs rising by 29,41%.
The statement below also addresses the often-discussed price difference between Euro and US Dollar prices in Fanatec’s webshop.
This is a post which is rather less fun for me but we cannot avoid it.
Due to the questionable strategy of the European Zentral Bank, the excheange rate Euro / USD has massively dropped in the past months. The target of the EZB is to increase Inflation and it seems that they are succesful with that attempt as all good made in the far east usually have to be paid in USD and therefore those products are now seeing a massive price increase.
We absorbed this price increase in the past months but we cannot do that anymore and therefore we had to increase all our European prices between 20 to 30%. We just hope that the Euro will not continue to drop and we can keep at least this Level.
And before everybody starts to complain why our Prices are more expensive in the Euro webshop than the prices you see in the US Webshop I would like to remind you that EU prices will always be about 30% more expensive in comparison to the US.
The reason is that the prices in the EU shop include VAT and this makes about 20% alone. The US Webshop prices do??not??include VAT or sales tax.
The other 10% are becuase of various reasons like higher logistic costs, localisation, more strict environmental rules and a 2 year warranty instead of 1 year in the US. All those little extras don’t come for free and this is the reason why almost every product in any category is more expensive in Europe than in the US.
I hope you will still stay with us and understand the situation. Thank you.
UPDATE
Here are some more facts:
May 2014: Euro/USD 1,3862
March 2015: Eur/USD 1,0664If a product costs 100 USD to manufacture it was 72,46 ??? in May 2014 and now we have to pay 93,77 ???
This is a cost increase of 29,41 %
