Amazon To Lose $10 Per Kindle Fire 181
An anonymous reader writes "According to a manufacturing cost breakdown, it turns out Amazon is willing to sell its new Kindle Fire at a $10 loss. An analyst estimates that the Kindle Fire, priced at $199, actually costs $209.63 to produce. That said, the device is likely to be much more valuable to Amazon through content sales and the ability to drive more purchases through its website."
no wonder they're buying palm (Score:2)
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this is the way it's worked in the Games Console market for decades. Sell the console cheap, make money off licensed games. No different here.
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Except, that it hasn't always worked out in the video game industry. After spending a significant amount of money on hardware, people aren't exactly enthusiastic about spending a lot more on content. With a lot of free content from places like youtube, project guttenberg, and even amazon itself, they are taking a huge gamble with this tablet.
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I think it's fair to say Amazon have a good idea of what each Kindle customer is worth from their existing Kindle data. I know the tablets reach a slightly different audience, but they will surely know approximately how many customers are going to continue past the free trial period for prime, and also how many customers will buy apps, music, video and ebooks. I'm also assuming they've made the task of buying content for the fire even easier than Apple made it one the iPad.
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I don't think it's an even slightly different audience. I think ebook readers target people like me who carry around a few gadgets already but don't like reading things on an LCD screen. To us the fire is a crappy ebook reader that duplicates the functions of existing gadgets. I think tablets are mainly being bought up people without many gadgets, and who need something that can work with a variety of formats. Half these people might just buy it so they can respond to e-mails while waiting for their coffee
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NookColor is $50 more expensive for hardware that's significantly slower.
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True, it's a little stale, but manufacturer refurbs run between $150 and $160 and are expected to plummet as soon as BN announces their next-gen Nook Color. For that money it's a great deal if only as a web browser and media player.
What will be interesting is if the follow-on is as hacker friendly as this model.
Re:no wonder they're buying palm (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that a fair number of nook colors have already been sold to the tablet tinkering crowd, and the HP touches during the blowout, and some of the Viewsonic and other cheap-but-not-bottom-of-barrel stuff, have all been out for a while, it won't necessarily be the case that the techie crowd will be all that dangerous in terms of numbers(especially if they do want to sideload some stuff; but also end up buying Amazon MP3s, kindle books, etc.)
It would certainly be no surprise to see some sort of lockdown; but it also might prove to not be worth the effort.
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Amazon is in a slightly better position than other companies that produce devices at loss.
A company that sells game console, cable box or phone to the consumer at loss intends to make profit on LICENSING access to things over it -- someone has to pay them to sell content to consumers (games) or consumers have to pay for access to something (TV, movies, wireless phone network). Now, rooted device allows to bypass those things -- everyone can write games, or switch to providers that have no relationship with
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1. If somebody were to produce a dead-easy piracy tool, like Napster in the good old days, Click->plug in kindle->select applications/books/etc you want->P2P download, root, install; that would probably make Amazon a sad panda. However, that seems comparatively unlikely in today's legal climate, and considering the 'rough-but-servicable, if you don't min
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2. If Amazon is actually losing money on these things...
I think this is an important point in itself... it seems like there could definitely be a $10 margin for error on an outside, tear-down estimate. If so, it's entirely possible they're just selling them at cost. Then everything they sell through the device is gravy and a small percentage of device hacks doesn't really hurt them.
Amazon hasn't been particularly hacker-friendly on the regular kindle front, but I suspect that had much to do with their ad-subsidized models being in the pipe. This device co
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one economic incentive (Score:2)
every time a hacker bricks his unit and cries for replacement/repair under warranty.
damn expensive, not vendors fault.
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The Nook Color is nigh-unbrickable since you can boot from alternate media and completely reformat internal storage, no matter how screwed the image is.
The worst that can happen is that you blow away the partition containing the MAC address, battery calibration, serial number, and the certificate that identifies the device to the BN store. For custom firmware, these aren't all that necessary, and from what I understand the BN stores have a magic SD card that can recover this all from a server based on the
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Do you have any references for this information? I mean, it's only starting shipping in over a month, how does anyone know what kind of security is there?
If it's coming from one of those guys who did a preview, I wouldn't trust it that much - they were likely given pre-production units, and this is exactly the area where one such is likely to be different from the final version.
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Well if an anlyst says so it must be true (Score:5, Insightful)
Gosh, these analysts get such huge salaries and most of the time they are wrong. What a great job!
Re:Well if an anlyst says so it must be true (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it hard to believe an estimation like this could even consider a $10 dollar difference not within margin of error. Pretty much non-news here.
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What "margin of error"? The *estimate* is $209.63. Not a penny more, not a penny less. Not "around $210" and not "$200+", but exactly $209.63.
That's either a totally bogus number, or inside information direct from the manufacturer.
Re:Well if an anlyst says so it must be true (Score:4, Informative)
That's either a totally bogus number, or inside information direct from the manufacturer.
Nah, Neither is my guess.
Fire up your telephone team and start polling parts manufacturers, who are often only too happy to brag about bagging a big order for wifi chip sets, touch screens, memory, processors, etc. Most of these places will even leak pricing info. The content of a tablet is well established these days. Crank in some custom plastic work (with 40 tablets on the market this cost is fairly well known too).
Put it in a spread sheet, Crank in assembly, shipping, divide by number of units, an out pops the Bill of Materials cost.
That's why you get things estimated to the penny.
Maybe that qualifies as BOGUS in your world, but the story clearly states " analyst estimates". I'm not sure the word "bogus" can rationally be applied to an estimate.
But it really doesn't matter. Amazon will make up any loss in the first month of ownership due to sales of apps, music, emagazines, and ebooks.
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But quoting a figure like that (with so many significant figures) implies greater precision than is possible from the input data, even if you do describe it as an estimate.
If you were estimating the height of a person across the room you wouldn't say he was around five feet eleven and fifty-nine sixty-fourths inches, would you?
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But so what?
When dealing with money people set their spread sheet columns to currency and pay no attention to significant digits or degree of actual precision.
If anything, this lends more weight to my throw numbers into a spread sheet theory.
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No it wouldn't be more accurate.
You can not make an overly precise value more accurate by making shaving insignificant digits.
Any estimate centered within the zone of uncertainty is just as valid as any other.
Extra digits do not add accuracy, but removing them does not add accuracy either.
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Where did I say that?
But actually it could be more accurate[1], if the to-the-penny value is an underestimate.
[1] which is not the same as precise. Learn the difference before you go calling people dumb.
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Amazon: Hi, I'd like to enter into a contract to manufacture 10 million parts.
Manufacturer: sure, let me look at my price list. It's going to cost you $10 per part.
Amazon: I am getting a BETTER pricing? I think I am going to sell 15 million units in 18 months
Manufacturer: no, because that would prevent interesting posts in slashdot. By the way, we leak all this info so that wannabe estimators can achieve 100% in their estimates. Sorry Amazon.
Amazon: Ok, no worries.
That's probably not how it works. Amazon es
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Since you don't seem to know about error propagation, let me fill you in. Anyone who has a decent background in math, and certainly any engineer or scientist should kno
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That number, for a 7" tablet seems awfully high.
Sorry, I just don't believe it's costing Amazon that much to make these things. Maybe it cost them that much to make the first 50, but they're going to sell a LOT of these things.
I love the 7" tablet size. Much more useful for me than 9-10". If the Amazon Fire has an SD slot, I'll buy three (one for me, my wife and daughter). If not, I'll wait a little longer.
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the screen will be more expensive (unless apple got some crazy deal by monopolizing the production) but the rest of the parts are pretty similar with a few back and forth tradeoffs. The 7" might need some smaller, more expensive, versions of parts to get everything to fit, while the 10" may have extra costs in trying to cut power use on other components so that they can power the larger screen with a reasonable battery life.
It seems like a fair price to
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That's either a totally bogus number, or inside information direct from the manufacturer.
Another option would be that it is a number "leaked" to the analyst, along with the cost breakdown, by the Amazon PR department. I'm sure there is a study somewhere that links sales to how close the sale price is to what is perceived to be the unit cost.
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And considering that a loss of $10 per unit could add up to substantial cost to Amazon when multiplied by millions of sales, while cutting the price by $10 will not sell appreciably more units relative to selling them at cost, it would be crazy for Amazon to sell them just $10 below cost.
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Not really. It doesn't take many ebook sales to cover that. Three bestsellers at the $9.99 price point would do it, or ten $2.99 books, or fifteen $0.99 books (they take a bigger slice at that price point -- although I'm ignoring whatever goes to overhead on the sale.)
Anything beyond that is gravy. The $199 is a psychological price point; they'd sell far fewer at $209.
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cutting the price by $10 will not sell appreciably more units relative to selling them at cost,
It's psychological pricing. 210 is in the 200's. $199 looks like barely more than $100.
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Except most of would call that $200. Just like most of us refer to something costing 99c as a dollar.
Anyways, my best guess is that they will make up the $10 when someone buys a $30 case with the kindle.
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But if it's true, it's still quite believable.
First, if any company can expect to compensate such a loss from other sales that are attracted by the device, it's Amazon - they've got their fingers in pretty much everything by now, and with very attractive pricing they're more often than not the first choice for many things (compare prices between iTMS and Amazon MP3 some day...). Given their appstore policies, it's likely that most users would make enough purchases there alone to pay that $10 back to Amazon
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It could be worth it for the shipping alone (which is where I get the real utility from it) but when you factor in the ever increasing library of streaming content and the fact that it costs less than netflix...add in integration with the Fire and its completely worth $79 a year.
Hell, with netflix splitting into 2, I wouldn't be surprised to see people dropping netflix streaming for nu-netflix dvds and amazon st
Re:Well if an anlyst says so it must be true (Score:5, Insightful)
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And of course, anyone who's ever been near manufacturing knows that the manufactured cost per unit for the pilot run is the same as it will be after you've refined your processes and established blanket POs with all your vendors. /sarcasm
True. I think the only BOM here is this estimate.
Re:Well if an anlyst says so it must be true (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd bet that even Amazon themselves couldn't produce a meaningful figure for what any particular one costs to make. They're probably buying enough parts from enough suppliers that all of their deals are changing all the time for each particular part. Not to mention the cost of the design process and creating and maintaining the custom software, production line shakeouts, estimated value of future purchases, estimated value of having control over some percent of the market, etc etc. Some department somewhere probably uses lots of Excel formulas and a little black magic to figure out that they'll do all right overall selling them for $199.
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A $10 loss is not bad (Score:2)
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Yup; the break even point (assuming a 50% profit margin on ebooks for amazon) is about four books. I would imagine the average kindle owner buys at least 10 books. This is the same sort of math you see for consoles.
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Wondering if they've estimated price over the projected life of the product, so that the $10 loss figure includes estimated cost reduction/efficiency improvements over time. Meaning they're losing much more than $10 per unit now, and it's still irrelevant if average users buy several dozen items on it.
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Turning out the first one is definitely not free. Each one after that is almost free.
Bulk Prices (Score:2)
Because it's not as though Amazon is able to get deals on all the parts for buying them in bulk. Yeah, it would cost you $210 if you were to buy all the parts to build your own Kindle Fire, but I don't get why people think it costs Amazon that much.
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Because it's not as though Amazon is able to get deals on all the parts for buying them in bulk.
Y'know I think they might have taken that into account. My local friendly electronics store is selling 7" displays for $265, three times the cost estimate in TFA.
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Because it's not as though Amazon is able to get deals on all the parts for buying them in bulk.
Y'know I think they might have taken that into account. My local friendly electronics store is selling 7" displays for $265, three times the cost estimate in TFA.
For one, the cost estimates are for wholesale prices directly from the manufacturer and they're for just the panel. Is your friendly electronics store selling just an LCD panel with no frame or buttons or anything attached to it except a ribbon cable to plug into a circuit board? For two, even if they take general bulk pricing into account, there's no way for them to know what Amazon is paying. Amazon is a huge company and they've probably got contracts to make several million units. You can get pretty good
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The phrase "There is only one horse in this here town" also comes to mind.
In short: Amazon pays what they want to pay. Not a penny more, nor less.
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In short: Amazon pays what they want to pay. Not a penny more, nor less.
Taking that argument to its logical conclusion, I'm sure that Amazon would *want* to pay thruppence ha'penny [google.co.uk], but that's not going to happen! :-)
Only $10? (Score:5, Insightful)
So a company with the bargaining power of Amazon makes a new product, and can't get the price down $10 more? I find that hard to believe. On top of that, the component prices in TFA are estimates. I see no indication of how accurate they are. I also don't see any point to this story.
Re:Only $10? (Score:5, Interesting)
ISuppli routinely lowballs estimates. Sure, the components cost this much. But how much does it cost to deliver them to the factory, put the devices together, test them, package them, write software for them, run the cloud services, etc, etc. It all costs money, and the fewer devices you sell, the greater fraction some of these costs are. So in a way, costs can't even be estimated until you know the overhead, and until you sell N units. And then Apple will sue their ass, further adding to the cost.
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Delivery costs are relatively low in general
Indeed, especially if they use Amazon Prime shipping.
Lawsuits are sure to come, sadly (Score:2)
And then Apple will sue their ass, further adding to the cost.
No, Apple is the least o
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So a company with the bargaining power of Amazon makes a new product, and can't get the price down $10 more?
I don't mean to be rude - but don't you think they were doing that already? That sounds like the Homer Simpson School of Management - "Could you make that cheaper?" Uh, OK...
Whether the estimates are accurate, I couldn't say.
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So a company with the bargaining power of Amazon makes a new product, and can't get the price down $10 more?
With twenty pointy-haired bosses saying this, they could get the price to zero!
$10 over is perfect (Score:2)
So a company with the bargaining power of Amazon makes a new product, and can't get the price down $10 more?
$10 over is perfect. In 3 months it'll be break-even, in 6 months it'll be $20 under. They have additional revenue streams and were able to introduce the very best product now instead of waiting until after Christmas.
So? This is news? (Score:2)
Along with R&D and marketing, infrastructure etc overhead, it is losing more than $10 per Kindle Fire sale. And this is news to whom? When you expect a steady stream of income for each device sold, you would be stupid not to subsidize it!
Similar to how many recent video game consoles were sold at a loss when they came out, to ensure a user base.
That's just one analyst's guess (Score:2)
I've seen another one that thinks they're losing $50 each, and another that thinks they're making $50 each (which I really doubt).
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Yes, this is clearly within error of break-even. Amazon is not going to sell appreciably more phone by taking a $10 loss per phone, so why do it? And since the main goal is not to make money on the hardware, but rather to sell Amazon's other products and contents, selling the tablet essentially at cost makes the most sense.
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oops...meant "tablets" not "phone"
Buying one makes Amazon *lose* money? (Score:3)
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Loss leader pricing strategy (Score:2)
Sure, just for the first few months... (Score:2)
Translation (Score:2)
CorporateSpeak (R) translation follows:
The device will be locked down HARD.
Sam
Not according to Amazon (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2393740,00.asp#fbid=ajRIdnxQUAV [pcmag.com]
"Amazon isn't doing anything special to prevent techies from "rooting" and rewriting the software on its powerful yet inexpensive new tablet, Jon Jenkins, director of Amazon's Silk browser project said."
OMG this is a new concept! (Score:2)
Content providers have only been doing this for DECADES!
Atari did this back when the 2600 first came out. Sell the console cheap, and require all software developers to pay them for the privilege to make games for their console.
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the're not going to lose 1 cent (Score:5, Interesting)
These kind of stories always show up - but no matter how much they think they know about the production they are STILL
underestimating the amount of buying power somebody like Amazon has.
Amazon is probably quoting an _initial_ production run of 10 million units. They are getting excellent pricing.
There is no way they are losing a penny on these things.
It doesn't matter (Score:2)
It doesn't matter if they lose a few bucks on each tablet sold. Amazon REALLY doesn't care. They can happily eat a loss on each tablet because they are not selling tablets. They are selling Amazon content delivery devices. The purpose of an Amazon content delivery device is to get you to buy content. If it takes a net cost of $10 to get one in your hands, they will happily pay. In fact, on the initial run, they will happily pay far more than $10 net dollars to get their Amazon content tube plugged int
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They could loose a little bit. And make it back up in a couple of book/item sales. Just depends what they want to consider ROI.
What's more, Amazon have a long history of using ultra-thin margins and making it back on volume. They own several markets completely through that strategy, yet without locking competitors out so that they don't have excessive regulatory trouble. Very very clever. Very dangerous to anyone competing with them. They also have a lot of eCommerce patents, which would make it ultra-hazardous for the likes of Apple to go after closing down distribution of the new Kindles (since the retaliation would likely involv
Original article here (Score:2)
Skip the middleman
http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/Amazon-Sells-Kindle-Fire-at-Low-Profit-Margin-to-Promote-Online-Merchandize-Sales.aspx [isuppli.com]
A lesson to HP... (Score:2)
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Do you care to explain how could it have possibly worked for HP?
They'll be under half of the nation's trees (Score:2)
Except .. (Score:2)
Seems cheap to me... (Score:2)
considering each Kindle Fire is a POS/cash register for Amazon.
Cost of production is not a static number (Score:2)
If the Kindle fire is successful and sells in big numbers the cost of production will likely drop quite a bit.
Amazon's completely willing to sell at a loss (Score:3)
It's four years later. I just today got one of the new $79 4th generation e-ink models. My bet is that they are losing money on this device big time- there's no way in hell it cost $79 to make.
Amazon doesn't care. They're selling the razors at a loss. But I just bought two books for my new toy. They won't be the last
Ka-CHING!
Nah, they could lose way more (Score:2)
I found a MIMO UM-720S Touch Screen USB Powered 7 Inch Swivel LCD Screen Mini Display for $174.99 rather than the $87 quoted in the investigative journalism research article.
http://www.amazon.com/MIMO-UM-720S-Screen-Powered-Display/dp/B002QFP4Z8 [amazon.com]
So if they get those then they will lose more like $98 per Kindle.
And, I could sell them enclosures for $113, not the $11 they quoted.
Then Amazon could lose $200 per Kindle. Now that's a really big scoop.
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Unless the Kindles just magically appear in the wearhouse and market themselves.
As well as developed themselves, and are so intuitive and bugfree that no support or maintenance is needed.
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Look, they could GIVE these things away and still make money on them.
The only connect to Amazon's own market and book store and music store.
95% of them will be used by non-hackers, who will continue to buy from Amazon.
In case you missed it, that's spelled KA-CHING!
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The only connect to Amazon's own market and book store and music store.
In truth, so long as they have a browser, they can connect to other markets as well - just not as conveniently.
Not that Amazon has a problem with that. Heck, I own a 3G Kindle, and I use its built-in web browser to buy and download books from a third-party book store - over Amazon's free 3G Whispernet. Very convenient. ~
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Unless the Kindles just magically appear in the wearhouse and market themselves.
This point has no substance. EVERYTHING requires marketing, not just the Kindles. When you hear that Nintendo is selling Wiis at a profit, you don't say, "Well except not, because they're spending millions on marketing!" You wouldn't say that for any product. Why should that enter the equation now?
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Exactly.
As long as you come close to cost, you will make up any difference in the first month of end-user ownership.
Books, apps, music, magazines, movies.
Bank!
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The term you're looking for is "loss-leader".
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In business school they call this the Gillette strategy, after the razors. Sell the razors at a loss...make your money back easily on the blades. Nail guns are sold the same way. The companies have been know to pass out free nail guns to construction companies just so they will buy more nails. Even if you buy a gun in a store, they are sold at pretty close to cost. Its a classic strategy. Besides, the more volume they can build, the closer to break-even they can get. By this time next year I bet they will be making a profit.
Except its not a strategy by Gillette: "The usual story about Gillette is that he realized that a disposable razor blade would not only be convenient, but also generate a continuous revenue stream. To foster that stream, he sold razors at an artificially low price to create the market for the blades.[1][3] But in fact Gillette razors were expensive when they were first introduced, and the price only went down after his patents expired: it was his competitors who invented the razors-and-blades model.[4]" h [wikipedia.org]
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Afaict the truth is noone really knows.
As I understand it these figures come from stripping a device down, making a list of all the significant parts (and maybe counting but not fully identifying the less significant ones like resistors and small capacitors), assigning a price to each one and then adding up a total.
The trouble is noone really knows what amazon pay for each part. They have to estimate based on general market prices and their estimates may be higher or lower than what amazon actually pays.