Shipment Dates, and War is Bad!

by Eugene Pomazov

Delivery dates update

We have some issues with second batch delivery from our factory. To say it briefly, we expect that all kits will arrive at Crowd Supply in the next week, and shipping will began mid to late next week (near July 25th).

If you are curious what’s going on, here are some details. As we described in our "Risks & Challenges" section on our crowdfunding page, there are several potential time-shifting factors. On top of that, we are now faced with a customs clearance delay.

Customs Clearance

As a rule, we ship boards from our factory by DHL, and it takes 2-4 days to deliver it in the USA.
To accelerate delivery to users, we asked our factory to ship part of the second batch

as soon as it is ready (about 200 pcs), and to not wait until all batch is assembled and tested. This shipment was arranged on July 9th. Yes, that was 10 days ago.

This parcel with 200 boards was stopped by customs in China at the moment of

export for a more detailed control (like HS and corresponding HTS code board conformity). This is a normal situation, as customs can choose any shipment for detailed control randomly. These boards are still on hold.

While this customs clearance procedure was in process, our factory prepared another 200 pcs batch, and

these boards were shipped July 17th. As of right now, this second batch has passed customs clearance in China, landed in the USA, passed customs clearance in the USA, and, as of this moment (noon, July 19th) has already been delivered to our kitting partner. You may notice that this delivery took just 2 days - we call this the "optimistic scenario".

We estimate that the time needed for kitting and delivery to Crowd Supply is 2-4 days, with some

time buffer. So we currently expect that shipping to backers will occur around July 29 - July 31.

War is bad!

Make hardware, not war!

As you might know, in our modern world war can have a lot of forms of war, and not only with weapons. Cyber wars, trade wars, and other hidden forms are around us. And if you are pacifist (like we are) and ignore all those wars, it does not mean that war will ignore you.

At this moment, we’ve been kicked by the trade war between USA and China. You may hear about so called "Trump" tax for almost all goods manufactured in China. At the end of last year 10% tax was added for a lot of goods imported to USA with "China" as a country of origin.

A potential rise from 10% to 25% had been previously mentioned. Well, as of May 5th, this tax has, indeed, been increased to 25%. Luckily, we were able to do a couple of things to cushion the shock:

First is keeping some financial cushion in our batch costs calculations, thanks to the

detailed Crowd Supply guide we followed at the moment of planning our crowdfunding campaign.

Second is production and cost optimizations for the second batch of production.

So now we are still able to keep our declared prices (without increasing them), and hope that financial part of this second batch will not end up negative.

Make projects, not war!!!

Tips for hardware projects

If you are hardware startup like we are, here are some useful details for you:

Brief "Trump" tax history review: https://www.ecomcrew.com/trumps-china-tariffs/
StereoPi’s HTS (Harmonized Tariff Schedule) code is 8538100000. You may find what that means on this official site:

https://hts.usitc.gov/?query=8538100000