On Tuesday 23 Sep 2003 12:07 pm, you wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 22:59:16 +1200, you wrote:
> >I was trying to get a feel for the probable higher volume cost of various
> >components based on known lower price breaks.
> >While there can be many factors involved which make this an impossible
> > task, a friend pointed out an approximate relationship which seems to
> > work quite well enough top be useful as a ROUGH rule of thumb.
>
> I don't think it's anything like that simple unfortunately - there are a
> huge number of variations between manufacturer and types of components - I
> don't think you can produce a meaningful 'avarage'

I think you can.  I used just this rule in estimating high volume production
costs for the last 20 years and it is astonishingly universal.  of course
there are exceptions but it works in by far the majority of cases.

Ian

>
> Low-end prices <1000 are very often distorted - some makers have obvious
> policies of not wanting to deal with small numbers (100x = 2x the 10x price
> for example), and different types of parts will have different economies of
> scale  - e.g. SM parts tend to come on reels, so anything below a reel
> multiple will be priced very differently depending on the distributors'
> attitude to splitting reels.
>
> For a part that is manufactured by the zillion, above a certain volume it
> doesn't actually cost much less to make/distribute 1million or 10 million -
> the definitionof 'zillion' will of course again depend on the type of part.

This is definitely not the case.  Many components are manufctured by the
zillion - most passive components, diodes and transistors for example and of
course batteries.  The above rule works very well for these parts and I have
tested it from quantities of a few thousand to many millions.

Ian

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