Quote from: tom_o on May 11, 2013, 04:58:25 PM

Quote from: SlyFoxy12 on May 11, 2013, 11:44:16 AM

On the other hand, if you look at things like the Raspberry Pie boards, they wanted to originally manufacture in the UK but couldn't because ultimately in VAT it cost more to import each component then have them sent to china and then imported as a whole, they some how got around this later on but I guess it was only due to price drops in demand that made it more feasible.

Nope it was assembly price/bulk assembly.

UK VAT is 20% whether it's individual pieces or the whole product. Think about it, the materials would be cheaper than the final product so the VAT on materials is LOWER than the VAT on the finished product. Doh.

Actually... because sadly I hate to lose I went and looked this up, a quote from the raspberry pi blog:

"Id like to draw attention to one cost in particular that really created problems for us in Britain. Simply put, if we build the Raspberry Pi in Britain, we have to pay a lot more tax. If a British company imports components, it has to pay tax on those (and most components are not made in the UK). If, however, a completed device is made abroad and imported into the UK with all of those components soldered onto it it does not attract any import duty at all. This means that its really, really tax inefficient for an electronics company to do its manufacturing in Britain, and its one of the reasons that so much of our manufacturing goes overseas. Right now, the way things stand means that a company doing its manufacturing abroad, depriving the UK economy, gets a tax break. Its an absolutely mad way for the Inland Revenue to be running things, and its an issue weve taken up with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

So we have had to make the pragmatic decision and look to Taiwan and China for our manufacturing, at least for this first batch. We are still working hard on investigating UK possibilities; at the moment, were investigating an option which would mean that all the Model As (whose demand we expect to be much lower than that of the Model Bs) will be built in the UK, and at the moment thats looking quite do-able, although its not as efficient economically as doing it in Asia. Ill fill you in on how that goes later on."

Link here if you want to claim foul http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/509

And before it, yes the reason I stated was slightly different to what it actually was but it was tax related any generally I was just making a point that the difficulty with ASCI chip production is making it efficient while competing with companies who can use proper factories and use investment money to make them in bulk.

Quote from: Silverpike on May 11, 2013, 04:53:50 PM

Quote from: cedivad on May 11, 2013, 11:46:43 AM

, received via pm:

Quote from: hata1234 on May 11, 2013, 11:43:04 AM

Hi..we're IC designer team.
we've been already complete the ASIC miner chip.
But we havn't enough money to start it.
W just want to find somebody pledge us.
if you can.we are happy to open the source and be the cheapest chip supplier.
Because we want the bitcoin stronger too.
Very thanks

Looks legit!

Well, it could quite easily be a scam but if they want to give their design away for free then surely they'd do it already or at worse look for small investors for prototypes to then use for a kick starter scheme.