Comment by sashank_1509
1 month ago
I’m surprised, so it seems like most tariffs are falling towards zero on all products except agriculture and cars below 17,000$ in the coming few years.
Especially cars, India has had insane tariffs on luxury cars and motorcycles that will disappear, which is interesting. On the face this seems like a good deal for India as India can probably export much more than EU can to India except for a few sectors like Automobiles and Chips, but who knows, I assume EU officials seem to think the gains in a few high tech sectors are enough to offset the cheap goods on all other sectors.
The cheap goods are already coming from China, so having more of it from India doesn't hurt them at all.
All automotive goods in India below the $17,800 pricepoint are essentially "Made in India", not China, and in a lot of cases exported abroad under Renault, Suzuki, Toyota, Hyundai, and Mitsubishi badges or directly sold by Mahindra (especially South America and South Africa) or Tata.
Chinese manufacturers got hounded out and as a result the PRC tried [0] and failed [1] to weaponize the WTO against India [0] for India trying to subsidize GreenTech driven industrialization.
Chinese manufacturers are allowed to enter India, but on terms similar to what the PRC used when Western, Japanese, and Korean players began entering the Chinese market - something which German policymakers even pointed out [2].
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-files-wto-case-aga...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-stops-chinas-reque...
[2] - https://table.media/china/thema-des-tages/indien-weshalb-chi...
Toyota Hycross is easily 2x the price and is made in India AFAIK.
1 reply →
It's all about German car makers wanting to sell more cars. The recent Mercosur deal was also about it. Of course, no one will buy them anyway since they are too expensive and low quality and Chinese cars are more accessible anyway.
I get the same feeling. German car manufacturers had most of their growth in the past two or so decades from the Chinese market. But now they lost the EV race and CHinese customers prefer Chinese EVs to German ones(Porsche alone lost 99% operating profits!), so they are desperate to offload those cars to new markets any way they can, even at the expense of poor trade deals that might damage other sectors of the EU economy long term.
It's not a coincidence that EU suddenly signs trade deals left and right with the utmost urgency, see the recent Mercosur deal. The coffers are going dry and they need to bring in every euro they can no matter the future societal cost.
I'm happy to be proven wrong, but personally I'm skeptical these trade deals will lead to an increase in purchasing power and QoL for the average EU working class citizen in many countries, who've seen a stagnation or even decrease in the last decade or so.
The high tariffs on imported luxury cars never made much sense from the revenue point of view.
Our bureaucracy and governments has finally learnt how to do a Pareto analysis and learnt the difference between high volume/low margin vs low volume/high margins.
> cheap goods
In a cost of living crisis, maybe this is seen as a helpful import?