October 26, 2026
A buyer in the United States posted a number this year that is worth more than most cost articles: his cost per assembled board had moved from about $60 to about $180. Nothing about his design had changed. Nothing about his quantity had changed. What changed was the route the board took to reach him.
The same discussion carried a rule of thumb from another buyer: budget extra landed charges at about 55 percent. Both numbers are real and both are dangerous, because a percentage is only valid inside the conditions it was measured in. The useful question is not “how much is the tariff” but “which of the numbers on this quotation will still be the same number when the goods arrive”.
An assembled board carries four costs, and quotations differ mainly in which of them are shown.
The unit price is the one everybody compares, and the one most likely to be quoted at a quantity break you did not order — the price at five hundred when you asked for fifty, with a footnote.
The one-off engineering charge covers stencils, fixtures, programming, first-article time and the design review. It is genuinely spent once, and it should therefore be visible once.
Logistics and import charges are the ones that change after the order is placed, and the ones least often written down. Freight is priced by chargeable weight and mode. Duty is priced by declared value, tariff classification and country of origin. Either can move without anybody in the factory doing anything wrong.
The fourth cost is the material you paid for and did not use. It is on no quotation at all, which is precisely why it is the one that hurts quietly.
European buyers complain that a per-part engineering charge of ninety euros for a prototype is high, and in the narrow sense they are right: it is high relative to the part. The better question is what the ninety euros buys and whether it survives the second order.
If the stencil and the fixture are made once and reused on order two, the charge amortises and the second order gets cheaper. If the supplier re-quotes the same engineering charge on order two, then the first charge was not engineering. It was a margin line wearing an engineering label.
There is a single test. Ask for the price of order two, at the same quantity, with the same files. If the one-off line disappears or shrinks, the charge was real. If it reappears unchanged, you were not paying for a stencil.
“Add about 55 percent for landed charges” is a useful planning number and a bad contract term. It was probably measured on a mid-value order, shipped by air express, into a country with a particular tariff schedule, in a particular year.
The rule breaks in three places.
It breaks on value density. A small, light, high-value board carries freight that is trivial against its value, so the surcharge is mostly duty and the percentage is low. A large, heavy, low-value assembly inverts this: freight dominates, and the percentage can exceed the duty by a wide margin.
It breaks on origin. The same board assembled in a different country, or declared under a different origin, can land in a different tariff line.
And it breaks on time. A rate measured in one quarter does not hold in the next. Use the percentage to size a contingency. Do not put it in a purchase order.
Reel minimums, minimum order quantities and non-cancellable non-returnable terms mean a fifty-board order frequently buys material for a hundred and fifty. The surplus does not vanish. It sits somewhere, and the question is where.
Three questions separate a small surplus from a slow loss. Who owns the leftover material — you, or the factory? Can it be returned, and at what restocking charge? And if it stays at the factory, is it reserved against your next order or merely stored, for how long, and at what cost?
A fourth question buyers rarely ask and should: if the surplus is yours and the design changes, what is it worth then? Often nothing. A reel of a part that is no longer on the BOM is not inventory. It is a receipt.
Between 2025 and 2026 the tariff conversation moved from an occasional thread to a standing topic in buyer communities, and the pattern inside those discussions is consistent: the buyers who coped were the ones who had agreed in advance who carries a rate change.
That agreement is a sentence, and it can be one of three. The price is fixed and the supplier absorbs changes until the next order. The price is fixed and a change is passed through with evidence. Or the price is quoted under a term that puts the import obligation on you, in which case the rate is your risk and you should be modelling it yourself.
None of the three is wrong. What is wrong is not choosing, and discovering the choice at the invoice. Two terms do most of the work: who is the importer of record, and at what point title transfers. If you cannot answer both for your current supplier, you do not yet know your landed cost.
Below is the list we work through when a buyer asks for a landed cost rather than a price. The last column is the part that matters: each question is built to produce a number or an admission, not a reassurance.
| Cost line | Who should state it | Where it hides | The question that exposes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unit price | Supplier | Quoted at a quantity break you did not order | What is the price at my actual quantity, not at the next break? |
| One-off NRE | Supplier | Spread into the unit price so the board looks cheaper | What disappears from this quote if I order 500 instead of 50? |
| PCB fabrication | Supplier | Quoted apart, then re-quoted after DFM | Is the board price firm at these dimensions, layer count and finish? |
| Component cost | Supplier | Priced at market on quote day, invoiced at market on purchase day | Is component cost fixed at order, or passed through at purchase? |
| Freight | Supplier or forwarder | Quoted per kilogram for a weight nobody calculated | What is the chargeable weight, and by which mode? |
| Duty and import tax | Usually the buyer, often nobody | Assumed to be the supplier’s problem because the price was called “delivered” | Under which Incoterm, and who is the importer of record? |
| Surplus material | Nobody | Minimum packs and MOQ bought for your order and left at the factory | Who owns the leftover reels, can I have them, and what does storage cost? |
| Rework and scrap | Nobody | Priced at zero because the yield assumption was optimistic | What yield assumption is inside this price, and what happens below it? |
Two lines deserve a flag. “Component cost” is the line most often left floating — priced at market on the day of quoting, invoiced at market on the day of purchase, with the difference landing on the buyer. And “surplus material” appears on no quotation at all, which is exactly why it is the one that hurts quietly.
When one quote is three times the other, the comparison is usually not between two suppliers. It is between two scopes.
Normalise before you judge. Same quantity. Same BOM with the same approved part numbers. Same inspection coverage. Same Incoterm. Same delivery date. Both with the one-off line broken out. Four of those six you can specify yourself; inspection coverage is the one to ask for in writing, because it is where a cheap quote usually hides.
After normalising, a genuine three-times gap almost always shrinks to something between 15 and 40 percent. That remaining gap is real, and it is usually the honest price of doing the work properly. The decision at that point is not a procurement decision. It is whether your schedule can absorb the cheaper option’s risk.
We quote with the one-off engineering charge on its own line, the component cost stated as fixed-at-order or passed-through, the surplus material position written down, and the Incoterm named. We will tell you which of the numbers we can hold and which we cannot.
We will not quote a landed cost for a destination whose tariff classification we have not checked, and we will not quote a percentage and call it a rule. If the classification of your assembly is ambiguous — and for many small electronic products it is — we will say so, because a number invented to look complete is worse than a gap labelled as a gap.
Ask any supplier for the second-order price at the same quantity. The answer tells you what the first quote was really made of.
Tell us your project scenario and requirements, and we will match the right solution and provide a quote within 24 hours.
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