Comment by snakeyjake

For practically any hardware startup if their margins aren't >33% they will fail to scale, wither on the vine, and die.

My employer makes space hardware and our overhead R&D expenses are so high that if we made 26% margin we would be bankrupt in a year.

So I think ~30% is probably a minimum floor to shoot for.

Just looked it up and Samsung Electronics has a margin that has ranged from 30% to 46% over the last couple of years.

I think the majority of people on HN are software guys who are completely oblivious to the challenges of building physical items that exist in the real world which is why your comment is downvoted.

That and beyond its stated purpose it seems that HN exists to allow people to complain about Apple in a public forum.

What makes all of this so strange is that large software vendors often have astronomical profit margins that hardware companies can only dream of. SAP (~70%) MSFT (~70%) TEAM (>80%)

https://ycharts.com/companies/SAP/gross_profit_margin

https://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/gross_profit_margin

https://ycharts.com/companies/TEAM/gross_profit_margin

Perhaps it is good that software companies have such high margins because if they didn't HN would be flooded with stories about how every company they get hired at goes out of business and management is clueless.