This website said this would happen some time ago and our fears appear to have come true with several retailers now reportedly looking at raising prices in a post-Brexit Britain.
Once you strip out the hyperbolic comments from some quarters about big bosses gouging the UK public which, is desperately untrue or misleading at best, the stark reality is that the value of the pound is way down on where it was.
This in turn makes imported goods more expensive and, even for the very few appliances that are put together in the UK the cost of the raw materials and many components will increase in price due to the weak UK currency. This is simply a fact and, one that manufacturers and retailers really can’t do anything about.
Most products, components and raw materials are traded using Euros or Dollars. Just look at the Pound against both and you can see it’s down substantially on both.
So, price increases are inevitable and completely unavoidable.
We’ve already seen and are still seeing this happen in the spares market with some pretty dramatic price hikes.
Now we’re hearing that AO, John Lewis and Dixons Carphone (Currys) are all expecting prices to rise on new appliances as well as other goods, soon.
Andy Street from John Lewis said to the Express that “We hedged this year but the issue is next year — it will have an effect. If inflation gets into the value chain, it will feed through.” In other words, expect prices to rise fat the start of 2017 or not long after that.
Exporters from the UK win, but anyone that buys in products from outside the UK and, especially from Europe in Euros or Dollars as most from China will be sold in, will have to face 10-25% price hikes in the not too distant future.
Thus far we’ve not seen any manufacturers increasing prices as such but, we do expect that to come as the currency changes come into play and old stocks are exhausted.
