The Console Supply Chain Didn't Leave China — It Left America: Japan Is Now 96% Chinese and Europe Only Started Moving in 2026

Excerpt: Five customs authorities, one product. In 2025 China's own export books show console exports rising 16% to $12.2bn while US-bound shipments fell 62% — because Japan took twice as much by value and Europe took 40% more. Japan now sources 96.2% of its console imports from China. Only in 2026 did the EU, the UK and Brazil begin the shift America made in early 2025.

The short version

The most repeated sentence in the console industry's supply-chain coverage is that manufacturing left China. The customs records of five jurisdictions say something narrower and stranger.

America left China. US imports of video game consoles from China fell from 94.5% of the total in December 2024 to 7.5% in July 2025 and 9.8% in July 2026.

Nobody else did — not in 2025. In the same year, Japan's console imports from China rose to 96.2% of everything it bought, up from 88.8%. Europe's imports from China rose to 80.9%. The UK's stayed at 84.6%. Brazil's stayed at 94.0%.

And China's own export books confirm it from the other side: China reported $12.17bn of console exports in 2025, against $10.47bn in 2024 — up 16.2% — while its exports to the United States fell 61.6%. The world did not stop buying Chinese consoles. It bought more of them.

Then, in 2026, the pattern finally spread — but only to the Atlantic markets. Between January and August 2026, China's share of EU console imports fell to 58.5%, Vietnam's rose to 17.6% and Thailand's to 3.7%. The UK, on its own customs books, fell to 54.6% Chinese in July 2026. Brazil fell to 69.5%. Japan, in July 2026, was still at 94.5%.

That is the finding this investigation is built on: the de-risking of the console supply chain was an American trade-policy event, not an industry migration — and the one market that never de-risked at all is the industry's home country.

Five markets, one product

OBSERVED. EU figures are Eurostat Comext, extra-EU imports, value in euros. US, Japan and UK figures are the UN Comtrade series each country reports about itself. Brazil is Comex Stat, FOB US dollars. Full source links at the foot of this piece.

Read the middle column. In the year the United States cut its Chinese console intake by roughly nine-tenths, the four other markets in this table either held their Chinese dependence flat or, in Japan's case, increased it by seven and a half points.

What the number is, and what it is not

HS 950450 is "video game consoles and machines, other than those of subheading 9504.30." The exclusion matters: 9504.30 is coin- or token-operated arcade equipment. Controllers and accessories sit in 9504.90 and are not in this series. When this line moves, the machines moved.

Two properties make it a good instrument. First, it is a single line across all origins, so the share calculation is not affected by a country renaming or splitting a tariff code. Second, the origin recorded is the origin declared at import — and in the EU, the UK and the US alike, that turns on where the substantial transformation happened, which for a console means where the board was populated and the unit assembled. A shift in this series therefore implies a shift in where the soldering irons are, not merely where a container was trans-shipped.

It is not, however, a volume series. Value moves with price and with product mix, and 2025 was a launch year: the Switch 2 went on sale in June 2025, which is why Japan's total console import bill rose 57% that year and Europe's rose 32%. The shares are the robust part of the dataset; the totals are not.

The mirror test: China's own books

The strongest check on any import-share claim is whether the exporting country's own statistics record the same thing. They do, and they record more than the American story.

China's reported exports of HS 950450, by destination (US dollars):

OBSERVED. UN Comtrade, reporter China, annual, HS 950450, FOB.

By weight the increase is smaller but still positive: China's console exports rose from 137.5 to 141.2 kilotonnes, up 2.7%. So this is more machines, not merely dearer ones — some of the value growth is the Switch 2's higher price, and some is volume.

The arithmetic is blunt. China lost $2.42bn of US console exports between 2024 and 2025 and added $1.23bn of Japanese ones, $0.65bn of Spanish ones and smaller increases elsewhere — and still finished the year $1.70bn ahead.

Japan's doubling is the cleanest single fact in this investigation, because both ends agree: China says it shipped $2.45bn of consoles to Japan in 2025; Japan says it imported $2.64bn of consoles from China. Those two numbers differ by 8%, which is about what freight and insurance should add. There is no room in that gap for a relabelling story.

The EU pair does not reconcile as neatly, and the reason is worth stating plainly: China's reported exports to the Netherlands, Germany and Spain in 2025 sum to roughly $2.95bn, while the EU's own records show €2.18bn (about $2.46bn) of console imports from China that year. The difference is port traffic. Rotterdam, Antwerp and Valencia handle console containers that leave the EU again for the UK, the Middle East and Africa, and goods in customs transit never enter the EU's import statistics. For Europe, this investigation therefore uses Europe's own books, not China's.

The American exception

The US series is not in dispute and has been reported: China's share of American console imports collapsed in a single quarter, between February and May 2025, as the IEEPA tariffs on Chinese goods took effect and Vietnam became the substitute. By July 2025 Vietnam supplied 63.7% of US console imports; by July 2026, 67.2%.

What the other four markets establish is the counterfactual. Japan, the EU, the UK and Brazil had no tariff wall to jump: a console enters the EU and the UK at a 0.00% third-country duty, and none of those markets applied a China-specific surcharge to the line in 2025 — and not one of them moved. The American collapse was policy doing the work that the industry had not chosen to do on its own.

This matters for how the last twenty months of console-industry coverage should be read. "The supply chain left China" has been written as an industry fact. On this data it was a border tax with a sourcing decision attached, and the rest of the world kept buying from the same factories.

Europe's 2026 turn

Then something changed in Europe — and, unusually, without a tariff.

EU27 extra-EU imports of HS 950450, 2026, by month:

OBSERVED. Eurostat Comext DS-045409, reporter EU27_2020, partner = country of origin, flow = imports, product 95045000.

For the first time in the series, China's monthly share of Europe's console imports fell below half — 49.4% in July 2026 — and Vietnam passed 30%. Thailand, which was a rounding error in 2024 and 2025, reached 8.7% in July and 7.1% in August.

The UK, working from a separate customs system and a separate tariff schedule, shows the same shape on the same months: 54.6% Chinese in July 2026 and 25.7% Vietnamese, against 84.6% Chinese for the whole of 2025.

Brazil shows it too, from a third continent and a third statistical agency: China 69.4% and Vietnam 22.3% across January–August 2026, against 93.9% Chinese in the same months of 2025. Brazil's case is the more striking because its total console imports rose over the period, from $135.3m to $187.5m — so this is substitution inside a growing market, not a contraction.

Why Japan did not move

Japan is the anomaly, and it is the part of this dataset that most needs an explanation rather than a chart.

Japan's console import bill rose 57% in 2025, to $2.75bn, and China's share of it rose to 96.2%. In July 2026 it was still 94.5%. The country that created the console industry is now the most China-dependent console market measured here — more dependent than Europe was at its 2025 peak.

INFERENCE, and it is an inference: Japan's 2025–26 demand was overwhelmingly two machines, the Switch 2 and the PlayStation 5, and the allocations sold into Japan were sourced from Chinese assembly lines while the Vietnamese lines commissioned in 2025 served North American allocations and, from 2026, European ones. That is consistent with the timing in all three series — Vietnam's share rises first in the US, then in Europe and Brazil, and barely at all in Japan — but this investigation has not found a company document that states the allocation, and readers should treat the mechanism as unproven even though the pattern is not.

The alternative — that Japan is simply buying a different mix — does not explain why the Japanese share rose in the exact year Vietnam capacity was being built for everyone else.

Three ways this could be wrong

One: trans-shipment. If Chinese consoles were being routed through Vietnam and merely declared Vietnamese, the origin shares would move without any factory moving. This is the standard way a supply-chain story is faked, and the standard test is the mirror: US imports from Vietnam rose from $0.34bn in 2024 to $3.75bn in 2025 while US imports from China fell from $5.79bn to $1.66bn, and China's own export books record the fall on their side too. A relabelling would have produced a wide and growing gap between the two sets of books; there is none of the right size.

Two: classification. If consoles had been re-declared into an adjacent heading, the value would surface nearby. It does not: the collapse in the US series coincides with the rise in Vietnam's own reported exports of the same code, and no adjacent heading absorbed a $4bn line.

Three: European entry-point artefacts. Eurostat's member-state detail is genuinely unreliable for this question, because a console entering Rotterdam and consumed in Munich is recorded once, in the Netherlands. The Netherlands alone accounts for the bulk of the EU series: comparing the same eight months, its reported Chinese intake falls from €1,304m in 2025 to €535m in 2026 while its Vietnamese intake rises from €14m to €230m. That concentration is why this investigation uses the EU27 aggregate, not member states — and why the UK's independent series, which has no Rotterdam problem, is the more valuable corroboration.

What it means

ANALYSIS. Two conclusions follow, and they point in opposite directions.

The first is that the industry's de-risking is real but late and uneven. Europe's 2026 turn is the first genuine, non-tariff-driven reallocation in this dataset: nobody in Brussels taxed a console, and yet Vietnam's share of EU imports went from 2.0% in the first eight months of 2025 to 17.6% in the same eight months of 2026. The likeliest reading is capacity, not policy — the Vietnamese lines built in 2025 to serve the American market reached sufficient volume in 2026 to supply Europe as well. If that is right, the console industry now has a second source, and it got it about a year after the tariff that forced the first one.

The second is that the concentration did not disappear; it moved. Europe and the UK are converging on the same Vietnamese corridor that supplies the United States, which means the West's console supply is becoming less diversified in the aggregate even as it becomes less Chinese. Japan, meanwhile, has not diversified at all.

For an industry that has been told, repeatedly and for two years, that its supply chain was leaving China, the honest summary of the customs record is this: it left one country's import statistics. The factories took the rest of the world's orders, and are only now beginning to lose them.

Sources

• Eurostat Comext, DS-045409, EU trade since 1988 by HS2-4-6 and CN8 — dataset and API (queries for CN, VN, TH, JP and eight other origins, January 2024–August 2026).
• UN Comtrade, reporter China (156), annual exports, HS 950450 — 2025, 2024.
• UN Comtrade, reporter Japan (392), annual imports, HS 950450 — 2025, 2024; monthly July 2026 via the same series.
• UN Comtrade, reporter United States (842), monthly imports — July 2026, December 2024 and July 2025 via the same series.
• UN Comtrade, reporter United Kingdom (826), annual and monthly imports, HS 950450 — 2025, July 2026 monthly via the same series.
• Brazil, Ministério do Desenvolvimento, Indústria, Comércio e Serviços, Comex Stat API, NCM 95045000, imports by country, January 2024–August 2026 — api-comexstat.mdic.gov.br.
• UK Trade Tariff API, commodity 9504500000, third-country duty 0.00% — trade-tariff.service.gov.uk.