Comment by zozbot234
3 days ago
You can only "gut" the competition if you're genuinely able to supply at lowest cost in a sustainable way. Selling at a loss and trying to make it up in volume is not a very good strategy. The Uber strategy was betting on having robotaxis everywhere, and then raising prices when they found out that this wouldn't be a viable solution in the near term.
The current memory prices are many times higher than the costs. Last month I was forced to buy some memory and it was more than 3 times more expensive than last summer. Moreover, this was in Europe, where currently computers and related products are cheaper than in USA, unlike in the previous years. The same memories that I have bought in Europe were much more expensive on Newegg.
If you can make memories, selling them at half the price demanded by Micron and the like is not selling at a dumping price, but it is selling with what in normal times would have been considered as a huge profit margin.
Studies of the 20th century manufacturing learning rate suggests that creation of arbitrary goods drops on the order of 15-20% every time you double production volume. This is before general purpose robotics and AI! Just interchangeable tooling, Taylorism, Ford style assembly lines, Toyota's supply chain ideas.
Selling at a modest loss and making the volume happen eventually means you're not selling at a loss anymore.