China Went From 87% of America's Console Imports to 7% in Six Months — and the Trade Data Says the Country Didn't Just Relabel It

Excerpt: In December 2024, 94.5% of the video game consoles America imported came from China. By July 2025 that was down to 7.5%, and Vietnam was shipping 63.7% of them. Twelve months later China is back below 10% and Thailand has quietly become the third-largest source. The monthly customs data behind that swing — never assembled in one place for this industry — shows a supply chain that did not relocate over years, but flipped in a single quarter, between February and May 2025. And a parallel paper trail of CBP origin rulings explains the mechanism: with one exception the country that solders the components onto the circuit board is the country the console is "from" — even when the finished machine is still assembled in China.

An original LostInConsoles data investigation, assembled from the UN Comtrade monthly series for HS 950450 (video game consoles and machines), cross-read against the U.S. Customs and Border Protection CROSS country-of-origin rulings issued between April 2025 and June 2026, and the harmonised-tariff rate structure those rulings now feed into. Every figure below is reproducible from the public Comtrade API; the ruling texts are public documents.

The short version

The console industry's move out of China has been reported as a broad strategic shift, usually with a graphic and a year attached. What the underlying monthly customs data shows is narrower and stranger than that: this was not a drift. It was a step change, and it happened across roughly a hundred days.

China's share of U.S. video-game-console imports ran between 69% and 97% every single month from January 2021 through February 2025 — fifty consecutive months, and not once below 69%. The only interruptions to that run in the whole dataset are in early 2020, when Chinese factories were shut for COVID-19 and Vietnam briefly filled the gap; China then climbed back above 90% by October of that year and stayed there. In other words: the last time America's console imports were not overwhelmingly Chinese, the cause was a pandemic, and the disruption lasted months. This time it has lasted seventeen months and counting.

Then:

For the full year: China went from $5.79bn of U.S. console imports in 2024 to $1.66bn in 2025 — a fall of 71.4%. Vietnam went from $341m to $3.75bn, up 1,001%. Over the same period the total value of America's console imports barely moved: $6.71bn in 2024, $6.73bn in 2025.

That last number is the one that matters. The market did not shrink. It was reassigned.

And the reassignment is still running. Through the first seven months of 2026, China's share has averaged 17.5%. Its single largest month this year was February, at $87m — against Vietnam's $170m in the same month. In every month since March, China has been below a third of the market while Vietnam has held between 38% and 68%.

What the number actually is

The series is HS 950450 — "games; video game consoles and machines, other than those of subheading 9504.30." The exclusion matters: 9504.30 is coin- and token-operated games (arcade cabinets, slot machines), so 950450 is the console shelf itself, not the arcade floor. It is not video-game software, not controllers, not accessories, and not general consumer electronics. When this line moves, it is the machines that moved.

The reporting is the U.S. import series, reporter code 842, taken month by month from the UN Comtrade public preview API. That distinction matters too, and it is the first thing a sceptical reader should demand, because "China's share collapsed" is exactly the kind of claim that can be an artefact of how a shipment is labelled rather than what physically happened.

The two ways this number could be lying

It could be a relabelling. If the console is still fully assembled in China but the paperwork declares a Vietnamese origin, the U.S. import column would move to Vietnam without a single factory changing. In trade-data terms this is the single most common way a "supply chain shift" is faked.

It could be a re-routing through a neighbouring tariff line. If shippers reclassified consoles into an adjacent code to dodge a rate, the China number would fall while China's actual output was unchanged.

Both are testable, and both come back negative.

Relabelling: the mirror-statistics test

If China were still producing the consoles and merely declaring them Vietnamese, then China's own export books would keep showing large U.S.-bound shipments. Countries report their own exports; the two sets of books are independent, and their disagreement — "mirror asymmetry" — is the standard tool for detecting exactly this.

They do not disagree. China's own reported exports of HS 950450 to the United States:

• 2023: $7.35bn
• 2024: $3.93bn
• 2025: $1.51bn

China's own statistics record the collapse as clearly as America's do. The 2025 figures are close enough to be the same event seen from two sides: China reports $1.51bn exported to the U.S., the U.S. reports $1.66bn imported from China. A relabelling would have produced a wide and growing gap between those two numbers. There is no gap to find.

Vietnam's own books tell the same story in the other direction: Vietnam reported $963m of HS 950450 exports to the United States in 2023, the year before the flip.

And the country that is genuinely new shows up hardest of all in its own records. Thailand's reported exports of HS 950450 to the United States were $0.1m in 2024. In 2025 they were $374m. That is not a rounding artefact or a reclassification — it is a country going from nothing on this line to a third of a billion dollars in twelve months, and reporting it about itself.

One asymmetry is worth flagging rather than burying, because it is the one place the two sets of books do diverge: on Thailand, the U.S. records $236m of 2025 imports while Thailand reports $374m of exports to the U.S. That 37% gap is the kind of margin that usually indicates goods routed through a third country, a timing difference between when a shipment leaves and when it is entered, or a value declared differently at each end. It is materially smaller than the $4bn swing being explained here, so it does not disturb the finding — but it is the reason the Thai figure is quoted from both ends rather than one, and it is the part of this series a follow-up should chase.

Re-routing: the neighbouring-code test

If the drop were a classification trick, the value should surface in an adjacent line. Checking every neighbouring code in the same heading:

Nothing absorbed it. 950430 and 950440 are small and did not grow. 950490 — the "everything else in heading 9504" bucket — held China at 67.5%, essentially unchanged, and shrank. The only line that moved violently is the one that names the product. A reclassification would have to move $4bn into one of those columns, and none of them has room for it.

So the shift is real, it is physical, and it is specific to consoles.

The mechanism is written down, and it is about a circuit board

The reason a console counts as Vietnamese is the interesting part, and it is not a matter of guesswork. U.S. Customs and Border Protection rules on it, in writing, on request, and has now done so repeatedly for exactly this hardware.

The pattern in the rulings issued from April 2025 onward is that the printed circuit board assembly — the PCBA — is where the product's essential character lives. The country where the components are soldered onto the bare board is the country of origin. The final assembly, which happens in China, does not change that.

Take the Razer controllers, filed by the company's Asia-Pacific arm in Singapore. For the Wolverine V3 Pro and Wolverine V3 Tournament Edition:

"the PCBA contributes to the main functionality of the finished merchandise… The complex SMT manufacturing production of these PCBAs, which includes the placement of numerous individual components onto a bare PCB, creates functional PCBAs that results in a substantial transformation of the components to produce PCBAs of Vietnamese origin."

"Additionally, the assembly process performed in China would not substantially transform the PCBA of Vietnamese origin into a new and different article of commerce with a name, character, and use distinct from that of the exported good."

— CBP ruling N350654, 18 July 2025

And the same formula, with the country swapped, for the Kishi V3 (N356709, December 2025), the Raiju V3 Pro (N362101, June 2026) and an unnamed controller ruled Thai (N355986, December 2025).

For consoles proper, the reasoning is starker. Valve asked CBP to rule on the Steam Deck OLED. The device's main board — carrying the processor — is built in Thailand, then shipped to China, where the supporting boards are made, the whole thing is installed into a housing, and the firmware is loaded. CBP's finding:

"the main PCBA of Thai origin is not substantially transformed in China into a different article of commerce with a new name, character and use."

— CBP ruling N347135, 24 April 2025

And for the Steam Machine, ruled in March 2026:

"the motherboard, which contains the essential functional components of the console, imparts the character of the finished article."

— CBP ruling N359665, 25 March 2026

Read the two halves of that together. The board is made in Thailand. The console is assembled in China. The console is legally Thai.

That is how "$5.79bn of Chinese consoles" becomes "$1.66bn of Chinese consoles" without anybody moving a screwdriver away from Shenzhen. What moved is where the board is soldered — and the customs record follows the board.

Why it moved then

The rulings tell you the how. They do not tell you the when, and the when is the sharpest thing in this dataset.

The flip is not spread across a year. Look at the sequence: February 2025, China at 81%. March: 31.2%. Whatever produced that, it did not have time to be a factory migration. Building a line, qualifying it, and shifting volume through it takes quarters. A 50-point share move inside five weeks does not look like a build-out. It looks like a decision already taken, activated.

Valve's Steam Deck ruling request is dated 26 March 2025. Razer's Wolverine V3 Pro request: 26 June 2025. Turtle Beach's Stealth Ultra request: 9 June 2025. These are companies filing paperwork to lock in an origin position, and they filed it in the same window the import data turned over. The legal position and the physical shift arrive together, which is what you would expect if both are downstream of the same decision.

The tariff environment those rulings now feed into is documented separately: heading 9903.05.77 (Thailand) and 9903.05.84 (Vietnam) carry "the duty provided in the applicable subheading + 12.5%." For HTS 9504.50 the ordinary rate is Free, so the surcharge lands at full value — 12.5% of $6.73bn is roughly $842m of duty on 2025's import volume, or about $478m if this year's seven-month pace were extended across twelve. The origin ruling is the document that decides which column the duty is computed in. That is why these filings happen.

The second front nobody has priced

Vietnam is the story everyone has. Thailand is the one that is still moving, and it is the more interesting of the two because it started from nothing.

In May 2026 Thailand supplied 24.3% of America's console imports — the country's highest month on record. Thailand's 2025 total was $236m against $54m in 2024.

Thailand is not assembling consoles. Thailand is making boards. That is precisely the layer the CBP rulings assign the origin to — which means the component country and the origin country are the same country, and the tariff consequence is priced against the component supplier rather than the brand. Valve's Steam Deck, Steam Machine and Steam Frame rulings all land on Thailand for that reason. Razer's controller rulings land on Thailand from the Kishi V3 onward.

So the map has quietly acquired a third node. Vietnam assembles; Thailand boards; China still assembles, and increasingly does not count.

What this does not say

Three honest limits.

It is a value series, not a unit count. If the mix shifted toward cheaper devices manufactured elsewhere while premium Chinese-made hardware held steady, the dollar collapse would overstate the physical one. The mirror test argues against a pure accounting effect, but value share and unit share are not the same measurement, and this dataset cannot separate them.

Three months of 2026 are still provisional. Comtrade's own preview flags recent periods as subject to revision; the 2026 figures used here run through July and may be restated. The direction and the scale are stable across the whole series, but the 2026 tail is the least settled part of it.

"Console" here means HTS 9504.50. Handheld PCs, gaming laptops and controllers sit in different lines and are absent from every figure above. The controller rulings are cited because they establish the mechanism, not because their dollar value is inside the 950450 series.

A large part of 2025's Chinese number is likely inventory. The December 2024 spike — $1.10bn in a single month, China at 94.5% — reads like an import surge ahead of a change, and the months that follow bleed down rather than stopping. The series shows the label moving; it cannot tell you how much of the residual is goods in transit versus goods still being made.

The bottom line

America's console supply chain did not leave China gradually. Between February and May 2025, China's share of U.S. console imports went from 81% to 22%, Vietnam's went from 6.7% to 59.8%, and the total value of the market did not change. The mechanism is not a mystery: the CROSS rulings spell it out, over and over, in almost identical language — the board is the product, and the board is not made in China any more.

What the data adds is the part the industry commentary has been missing. It gives the date, the magnitude, and the checkable counter-hypotheses. The relabelling theory fails on the mirror statistics. The reclassification theory fails on the neighbouring codes. What is left is a factory layer that relocated, a component layer that relocated to a different country entirely, and a tariff that followed both of them out.

Sources

• United Nations Comtrade — UN Comtrade Database, HS 950450 (Games; video game consoles and machines, other than those of subheading 9504.30), reporter United States (842), monthly and annual import series by partner country, 2020–2026. Public preview API: comtradeapi.un.org. Annual data and code definitions: comtradeplus.un.org
• U.S. Customs and Border Protection — CROSS rulings (country of origin):
  • N347135 (24 Apr 2025) — Valve Steam Deck OLED; main PCBA of Thai origin not substantially transformed by Chinese final assembly → Thailand. rulings.cbp.gov/ruling/N347135
  • N349996 (1 Jul 2025) — Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra Wireless XB/PC controller; eight PCBAs assembled and tested in Vietnam → Vietnam. rulings.cbp.gov/ruling/N349996
  • N350654 (18 Jul 2025) — Razer Wolverine V3 Pro / V3 Tournament Edition; Vietnam SMT → Vietnam. rulings.cbp.gov/ruling/N350654
  • N355069 (6 Nov 2025) — Razer Wolverine V3 Tournament Edition 8K; Vietnam SMT → Vietnam. rulings.cbp.gov/ruling/N355069
  • N355986 (10 Dec 2025) — gaming controller; Thailand SMT → Thailand. rulings.cbp.gov/ruling/N355986
  • N356709 (17 Dec 2025) — Razer Kishi V3 / V3 Pro / V3 Pro XL; Thailand SMT → Thailand. rulings.cbp.gov/ruling/N356709
  • N359665 (25 Mar 2026) — Valve Steam Machine; motherboard made in Thailand imparts the character of the finished article → Thailand. rulings.cbp.gov/ruling/N359665
  • N360699 (29 Apr 2026) — Valve Steam Machine Bundle; origin of the set follows the console's essential character, retail packaging must mark each item. rulings.cbp.gov/ruling/N360699
  • N362101 (23 Jun 2026) — Razer Raiju V3 Pro; Thailand SMT → Thailand. rulings.cbp.gov/ruling/N362101
  • Full text of every ruling is searchable at the CBP CROSS database: rulings.cbp.gov
• U.S. International Trade Commission — Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States, Chapter 99 Subchapter III, headings 9903.05.77 (Thailand) and 9903.05.84 (Vietnam), rate column "the duty provided in the applicable subheading + 12.5%"; HTS 9504.50 general rate: Free. hts.usitc.gov

Note on method: the import and export series were pulled directly from the UN Comtrade public preview API and aggregated by partner country; the monthly figures reproduce to the cent on re-fetch. The mirror-statistics and neighbouring-code checks were run explicitly as attempts to falsify the headline, and are reported with their results. The origin findings and the rate-column wording are quoted verbatim from the CBP rulings and the HTS. The argument connecting the origin rulings to the import shift — that the customs record follows the board rather than the assembly line — is LostInConsoles' reading of those two public records, and is labelled as analysis. Forward-looking statements about the 12.5% surcharge are arithmetic on published rates and observed import values, not a projection of realised duty collections.