Why the multiplier exists
Tokenizer vocabularies are trained on corpora dominated by English. English words earn dedicated tokens; other languages are rebuilt from sub-word fragments or raw bytes.
The effect is largest for non-Latin scripts, where a single character can cost two or three tokens. It is not a defect — it is what optimising a fixed vocabulary for one distribution does to everything outside it.
The business consequence
Your unit economics differ by market. A product priced uniformly worldwide has a materially different gross margin in each region, and the worst margin is exactly where the multiplier is highest.
This is worth knowing before you launch in a market, not after. It also affects which model you should route each locale to.