Strictly cost. Developing two bodies would make zero sense for
cameras that share so much. Pentax would be stupid to try to do so
as far as I am concerned.
Even if they could market one on size? We're talking about tens or
even hundreds of thousands of production units here... would two
different mouldings really be such an overhead? But then, maybe
Pentax don't want to market on (small) size, as we both suspect!
Basic economics.
Lets say you're a manufacturer making camera X. In a hypothetical (i.e. 'perfect') world the fixed unit costs of the process are the raw materials: steel, aluminium, plastic etc for the body, electricity, bare (un-cut/un-shaped) circuit boards, CCDs, CPUs, LCD screens, labour etc -- and for the purposes of the argument, lets also say that in this hypothetical world, they come to $100 for every unit of camera X you produce irrespective of whether that number is one unit, a hundred units, a thousand units, or ten-thousand units.
Now comes the variable costs: the cost to employ the design team, the cost to produce the manufacturing drawings, the cost to tool up your production line, the cost to train your workers, the switching cost (loss of sales, revenue etc) while converting a production line producing camera T to producting camera X, and the cost of marketing the new camera -- and for the purposes of this argument, lets say these costs come to a total of a million dollars regardless of how many units of camera X are produced.
...And since the grand-total cost of production is the fixed plus the variable costs, the costs to produce one camera in this model is $1,000,100 and the costs to produce other numbers of camera are:
$1,010,000 for one hundred cameras ($10,100 per camera);
$1,100,000 for one thousand cameras ($1,100 per camera);
$2,000,000 for ten-thousand cameras ($200 per camera)
Now although the production costs for camera X cannot drop below the fixed cost of $100 for the raw materials for each camera, as can be seen, the more units produced, the more the variable costs of production approach $0 per unit.
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So lets extend the model to two new camera designs: camera X which we're already producing (and which replaced camera T in the product lineup), and now we're going to produce a new camera (camera Y) to replace camera U.
So lets say the fixed cost of producing camera Y is $150 per unit due to more material for the body shell, a larger LCD, and a SR unit
The variable costs come to $1,500,000 (design of SR unit, new body design, different tooling etc).
cost to produce:
1 unit of Y is $1,500,150
10 unit of Y is $1,501,500 ($150,150 per unit) 100 unit of Y is $1,515,000 ( $15,150 per unit)
1,000 unit of Y is $1,650,000 ( $1,650 per unit) 5,000 unit of Y is $2,250,000 (
$450 per unit)
10,000 unit of Y is $3,000,000 ( $300 per unit)
Now lets add the propositions that 10,000 units of camera X, and 5,000 units of camera Y are being sold, and that X is selling at $850 per unit; Y is selling at $1000 per unit; the market is saturated until a new camera comes along; and that a tooled-up production line has the capability of manufacturing 20,000 units (meaning the line for X is operating at 50% capacity and the line for Y at 25% of capacity). Lets also add that the factory has three production lines with the third line producing the very popular camera S (20,000 units produced, selling at $500 per unit on unit production costs of $100). The manufacturer wants to introduce a new camera line (Z) with higher-end features than Y which could sell two-thousand units at $2000 per unit on unit production costs of $875 (not including switching costs), but the switching costs of stopping S production are much higher than the costs of stopping T and U production, and the cost of expanding or opening a new factory to house additional production lines is ten-million dollars.
So the numbers look like:
X revenue on 10,000 units = _$8,500,000; profit on X = $6,500,000
Y revenue on
5,000 units = _$5,000,000; profit on Y = $2,750,000
S revenue on 20,000 units = $10,000,000; profit on S = $8,000,000
projected revenue on 2000 units of Z = $4,000,000; projected profit on Z = $2,250,000
cost of expanding existing or opening new factory is $10,000
total profit on X, Y, and S = $17,250,000 (no new factory required)
total profit on X, Y, and Z = $11,500,000 (drop S, no new factory required)
total profit on X, Y, S, and Z = $9,500,000 ($19.5 mill minus $10 mill for new factory)
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... end of part 1. please see part 2 for rest of model/argument
