I'd estimate the real manufacturing cost at somewhere between $80-110. I can see this won't be accepted in this farcical thread but that would be a typical and realistic figure. That doesn't include production line setup costs, product development, duties, royalties etc which will need to be put on top. If the uk price is £280 that is about £233 before VAT, with a 10% margin that is £28 so £205 and perhaps allow the £5 for packing and delivery to retailers from Nintendo UK's warehouse. So Nintendo are only going to see about £200 per unit. $110+55=165 which is about £135 I think so I'd say Nintendo are making about £65 profit per unit.
Yes this figure is likely wrong and out by quite a margin but I can almost guarantee it's more realistic that $257 for the factory door price which is utterly mad and ridiculous. I worked previously in importation of goods and the lowest margin product I dealt with was something like a $40 cost and £100 suggested retail price and that was a low margin with the dealer price maybe £75-80. Some products that retailed at £2 were imported for 10-15c. Everyone has to have their cut along the way. Products that failed to sell were discounted as you can imagine but there was always a healthy margin. Nintendo aren't a charity if the Switch sells it will make them big profits which they certainly won't get with a $257 manufacturing cost. What inside a Switch would ever justify such a high manufacturing cost anyway. There is nothing of value on the pcb except the main Tegra chip and 2 memory chips, the screen is low spec 720p and li-ion batteries are very cheap to produce. The dock is just a plastic housing with a simple usb controller chip on a pcb. PSU's are super cheap. Nothing in the controllers either of value. Even a ps4 slim which is much cheaper has a hard drive, decent memory, optical drive, much more powerful chipset and everything is scaled up to be usable with a more powerful system, psu etc. We have sub £40 android tablets in the uk with larger screens and much more powerful cpu's than Switch, only the gpu and available memory is superior on Switch plus the controllers and dock are added.
