logic56 said:
and you know this how?? |
You people should learn the difference between manufacturing costs and production costs. Every gadget has manufacturing costs, this is the cost of the parts, the labour costs to assemble the parts into the gadget, shippin and packaging the gadgets into stores. These costs are fixed at any time - you know how much the parts cost, how much the shipping company charges etc. As far as manufacturing costs go, Sony is profitable, they get more money for each gadget they sell than the pay for manufacturing it.
As far as production costs go, these costs are NOT fixed. Production costs include R&D, prototyping, "freebies", etc. Let's assume R&D alone costs 100million and Sony gets $1 more per gadget than they pay for manufacturing costs. Obviously it would need 100 million sales until Sony makes any profit on the hardware, or assuming 10 million units are sold, it would take 10 years until the gadget gets profitable.
Now Son has planned to be profitable in three years. Since we don't know how many units Sony plans on selling in those three years or how high the R&D costs actually were, we could only guess those numbers by counting the actual sold units with the actual margin or wait until Sony announces profitablity and then "count backwards".
This definition of profitability is based on the hardware alone (like sales of "normal" electronic devices, and is most likely the correct one. Of course you could add profits selling software and peripheral stuff to this equation -but the idea is incorrect as this stuff also has manufacturing and production costs.
All we can say is that in three years (if thing go well), Sony sells the gadget profitable on the production level, not on the manufacturing level only. I hope this was clear enough because I have somewhat lost my train of thoughts...
