The Polymega Was the Only Game Console Being Assembled in Myanmar, and Its Contract Manufacturer Just Quietly Shipped the Tooling Back to China

Excerpt: Highway Holdings (Nasdaq: HIHO) told shareholders on September 28, 2026 that it "restarted our game console manufacturing business" in China after shipping "most of the material and necessary assembly tools" back from its Myanmar factory, where the work had run for years. The console is the Polymega, made by Playmaji. The move is the quiet end of the only known video game console production line in Myanmar — and the reason is in the same filing: customers left the country "after it was blacklisted in Europe due to human rights abuses."

A primary-document reading of SEC filings by Highway Holdings Limited (CIK 0001026785), the contract manufacturer of the Polymega retro console. Sources below: the September 28, 2026 shareholder letter (Form 6-K), the fiscal 2022–2026 annual reports (Form 20-F), the quarterly and interim releases furnished as Form 6-K between 2020 and 2026, plus the Polymega price-update page, Time Extension's 2021 reporting, and US and EU regulatory instruments. Every figure, date and quotation below is taken from those documents or named sources.

The short version

From the Polymega's 2021 launch until early 2026, anyone who bought one — a $500-plus modular retro console that plays original SNES, Mega Drive, TurboGrafx and PlayStation discs and cartridges — was buying a machine assembled in Yangon, Myanmar.

The Polymega's manufacturer is Playmaji, Inc., a Los Angeles company. The assembly was done by Highway Holdings Limited, a Hong Kong-headquartered contract manufacturer with factories in Shenzhen, China and Yangon, Myanmar. Highway Holdings said so itself, repeatedly, in its own SEC filings: an October 2020 press release announcing a "significant, multi-year order … to manufacture Playmaji's Polymega game consoles and accessories"; a July 2023 release titled "Highway Holdings to Resume Full Production for Playmaji."

That arrangement ended quietly, and the company disclosed the ending in a single paragraph of its fiscal 2026 shareholder letter, filed with the SEC on September 28, 2026.

What the filing says, in its own words

The paragraph sits inside chairman Roland Kohl's letter to shareholders, in the company's third-quarter fiscal 2026 discussion — the portion of the letter explaining why a hoped-for return to growth at the Chinese factory was slower than planned:

"We also restarted our game console manufacturing business, which previously ran production out of our Myanmar factory. We shipped most of the material and necessary assembly tools back to our factory in China. This transition took time and delayed the anticipated start of the business. We finally started the production in early of February and expect first shipments will soon leave the factory."

Read plainly, that is a supply-chain move in three parts: the console line had been in Myanmar; the tooling and materials were physically moved to China; production restarted in China in early February 2026.

The same shareholder letter, a few paragraphs earlier, explains why the Myanmar factory emptied out in the first place:

"Unfortunately our entire fiscal year 2025 was affected by the political decisions of our biggest customers to stop all their business from Myanmar. Our beautiful and highly profitable factory in Yangon, and our dedicated employees who have served our customers for many years were severely affected by it. The operations came to a near full stop, with the exception of some business from smaller customers and wind-down orders. Consequently, we had to lay off most employees."

Who left, and why

Highway Holdings does not name its customers. The audited annual reports are blunter than the press releases about why the orders stopped. In the "Trends and Uncertainties" section of the fiscal 2026 annual report, the company lists the causes of its sales decline in order, and the second one is specific:

"the decrease in orders from certain of the Company's German customers for products manufactured at the Company's Yangon, Myanmar, factory because of Myanmar's civil unrest and human rights record and policies and the potential regulatory and brand risks that may result"

The same report discloses, in its business description, that "In fiscal 2026, however, two of the Company's major customers significantly reduced its orders for products that had been manufactured in Myanmar. As a result, the Company reduced the scale of certain Myanmar manufacturing activities and downsized headcount at the Myanmar facility."

That phrasing sits in a document chain about Germany — and it would be easy to read the withdrawal as a purely European-customer event. But the company's own shareholder letter attributes the console exit to customers leaving Myanmar "after it was blacklisted in Europe due to human rights abuses," and the console customer is American. The two facts are consistent: the regulatory and brand risk that emptied the Yangon factory is the same risk that forced even a US customer's product off the Myanmar line.

The European reference is anchored in real instruments. Myanmar's government was added to the European Union's list of high-risk third countries for anti-money-laundering purposes by Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/410, adopted February 2023, following the Financial Action Task Force's October 2022 decision to place Myanmar on its "call for action" list. Separately, the EU suspended Myanmar's trade preferences, and the country's apparel and manufacturing sectors came under sustained pressure through 2022–2023.

Three years later, production restarted in China, in February 2026.

Why this matters beyond one factory

The dominant 2024–2026 narrative in console supply chains is diversification away from China — Vietnam, Thailand, India, and the "China-plus-one" migration. Here is a documented case running the other direction.

A video game console that had genuinely moved its assembly out of China — to Southeast Asia, no less, the exact destination the diversification story points to — moved it back, because the destination country's human-rights record made the product unsellable to the customers who buy it.

That is a category of supply-chain risk the diversification conversation mostly omits: that "China-plus-one" destinations carry their own political and reputational liabilities, and a product attached to a consumer brand can be forced to retreat even when the labor and logistics are favorable. Highway Holdings called the Yangon factory "beautiful and highly profitable." It still emptied.

The console, and the customer, identified

Highway Holdings never names Playmaji in its audited annual reports — the phrase "Playmaji" appears zero times across the fiscal 2022 through fiscal 2026 20-F filings. The identification rests on the company's own press releases:

• October 2020: "Highway Holdings … announced that it will commence a pilot program to manufacture a security-related product for a U.S.-based company." (a separate, pilot-stage customer)
• October 15, 2020: a "significant, multi-year order … to manufacture Playmaji's Polymega game consoles and accessories," per the July 2023 release's own recitation of it.
• July 27, 2023: "Highway Holdings to Resume Full Production for Playmaji," naming "the Los Angeles-based company behind the modular multi-system game console Polymega."
• February 2024: a further resumption release.
• March 5, 2026: the console restart language quoted above.

And the geographic identification is corroborated outside the filings. Time Extension reported in August 2021, on the Polymega's launch, that "the ongoing civil unrest in Myanmar, where the Polymega is being manufactured," was the cause of shipping delays — and quoted Playmaji CEO Bryan Bernal referring to "our Myanmar assembly facility in 2021." Wikipedia's Polymega entry likewise records Myanmar assembly.

The nuance a careful reader should hold

There is a real discrepancy between the marketing language and the audited disclosure, and it is worth stating rather than hiding.

The literal phrase "game console" appears in Highway Holdings' shareholder letters and press releases — the October 2020 and July 2023 releases, and the March 2026 letter — but not in the audited annual reports after fiscal 2024.

• The fiscal 2024 20-F (year ended March 31, 2024) does describe it directly: "During the fiscal year ended March 31, 2024, the Company provided sub-contracting services to a game console manufacturer in the Unites States, whereby the Company performed assembly services for game consoles." It also refers to "our U.S.-based customer, which operates a game console business."
• The fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2026 20-Fs drop the gaming language entirely. Across the fiscal 2026 annual report's roughly 465,000 characters, the words "game" and "console" do not appear at all.

So the only place in the fiscal 2025–2026 record where the console business is disclosed in plain terms is the shareholder letter and the quarterly press releases — not the audited filing. Readers tracking the business through the 20-F alone would not see it.

The pricing footnote

The Polymega's own economics moved in the same window. In a September 18, 2026 post titled "Polymega Price Update, Effective October 5th," Playmaji raised prices across the line — the Base Unit to $599, the Remix to $229, wired controllers to $35, Element Modules starting at $99 — citing component and memory costs "driven in large part by the surge in data center investment for AI, which is competing for the same chips, memory, and other parts that go into consumer electronics," plus fuel costs. Playmaji separately said Remix units had "complete[d] mass production."

What was verified, and what was not

Confirmed from primary filings:

• The console line ran in Myanmar and was moved back to China; tooling and materials were shipped to China; production restarted in early February 2026. (Fiscal 2026 shareholder letter, filed September 28, 2026.)
• The Yangon factory came to "a near full stop"; most employees were laid off. (Same document.)
• Two major customers significantly reduced Myanmar orders in fiscal 2026. (Fiscal 2026 20-F.)
• Certain German customers reduced Yangon orders "because of Myanmar's civil unrest and human rights record and policies and the potential regulatory and brand risks." (Fiscal 2026 20-F.)
• The product is the Playmaji Polymega. (Highway Holdings releases, October 2020 and July 2023; Time Extension, 2021.)

Not confirmed / held open:

• Highway Holdings never names the console customer in its filings, and its letter does not say which customer's product moved. The Playmaji identification rests on the releases that explicitly name both parties and the product.
• No primary Playmaji statement was located confirming the manufacturing-location change from its own side; the move is documented from the manufacturer's filings, not the brand's communications.
• Whether the customer that left is the one that ordered the move back is inferred, not stated: the filings support that console production was in Myanmar and now is in China, and that major customers left Myanmar, but do not join those dots in a single sentence.

Sources: Highway Holdings Limited SEC filings (CIK 0001026785) — Form 6-K shareholder letter dated September 28, 2026 (accession 0001213900-26-104029, exhibit 99.2), fiscal 2026 Form 20-F (accession 0001213900-26-077959), fiscal 2022–2025 Forms 20-F, and Forms 6-K dated October 2020, October 2020 (release), July 2023, November 2023, February 2024, March 2026, and September 2026; Playmaji, Inc. Form D; polymega.com price update dated September 18, 2026; Time Extension, August 2, 2021; EU Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2023/410; FATF "call for action" listing, October 2022; US Executive Order reciprocal tariff schedules, July 2025.