Razer Pauses Laptop Sales Amid Tariffs
When you visit the Razer website's laptop section, you're faced with laptop accessories, rather than laptops. If you dig around enough, you can find the customization tools for laptops, such as the Razer Blade 16, but adding them to your cart is another thing. Those we found were marked Out of Stock and displayed Notify Me buttons in the place of Buy buttons.
The Verge asked Razer recently about its stance on tariffs, to which Razer's public relations manager, Andy Johnston, replied, 'We do not have a comment at this stage regarding tariffs.' The PC maker hasn't provided any further details.
Credit: Razer
The Trump administration announced today that it's pausing most tariffs for 90 days. The news gave the stock market an upward jolt, but whether businesses will resume sales of products that they've taken off the market is an open question.
In the case of Razer, pausing laptop sales is a dramatic step. The company makes and sells computers and accessories aimed at gamers. Taking its gaming laptops off the table, even temporarily, has to come at a significant hit to the company's bottom line. Although companies sometimes take political stances, they typically involve messaging rather than stopping product sales. Given the stakes, it seems likely that Razer (and Nintendo and others) view these product removals as being in their own best interests.
Larger businesses with plenty of stock stateside may not need to pause sales as quickly as businesses that assemble products on demand for customers. Regarding companies that build custom PCs, tariffs likely offer a particularly difficult challenge. The US government's on-again, off-again approach to tariffs further complicates things. The 90-day break adds some stability for the next three months, at least. Now, we'll see if businesses start bringing back the products they shelved.
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