I'd have to say Mike is right on in his New Old Stock comments.
I worked for 10 years for a children's book/game/toy manufacturer.
The $15-$25 books were always hell to forecast.
The Sales department was always optimistic,
hoping for low costs from a big production run.
Doing forecasting and inventory control,
we ended up with 10 years inventory of some books.
The point is, when you make 10,000 or 20,000 of something,
the setup costs on production runs eat you alive.
Regards, Bob S.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< Pal wrote:
> REPLY:
> If anyone could put up a low volume production line, its Pentax. Look at
the
> lens line: Most of the 35mm system lenses are low volume items. In
addition,
> you have the medium format lenses, also low volume. Pentax possibly make
> around 100 different lenses. The vast majority are low volume items.
Pentax do
> indeed have the production means to make such items. I sort of doubt that
eg.
> Canon has.
This is not how lenses are manufactured. If a company sells 200 lenses a
year it doesn't mean that they produce 200 lenses that year on any
"low-volume production line." Many lenses are made in batches by devoting
production facilities to a "run" of them and then sold out of N.O.S., or new
old stock. The company evaluates sales, makes a projection (educated guess
about future sales), crunches the numbers, decides on a batch size, and
evaluates whether a run will be profitable. Lower-selling items have sales
projections that in some cases stretch to a decade and more. Many products
are made in one run only.
With all camera companies, many of the items you buy as "new" were not
manufactured recently. In some cases, I've known of specific products that
have sold out of N.O.S. for more than 20 years.
This explains a few things the consumer market sometimes sees. For example,
when Nikon introduced its AF lenses, there were chronic intermittent
shortages of certain items for several years--that's because Nikon badly
underestimated demand and was caught short of product with no production
facilities scheduled to be assigned to those products again until an
already-decided future date. It also explains steep price hikes in lenses,
as when the Zeiss 35mm shift lens went from $600+ to about $2200 in the
space of a year in the early '90s. What happened was that Kyocera had been
selling N.O.S. made in the '70s, ran out of them, and ordered a new batch
from Zeiss. Zeiss charged Kyocera based on then-present production costs,
which meant that Kyocera had to sell the new-run lenses for much more than
it had been charging for the previous stock.
This also explains why decisions have to be made about whether to
discontinue a product. It's not a question of stopping a production line
that's been running continuously for years: it's a decision about whether
they think it will be profitable to make another run. For example, Nikon
Special Optics used to make two enlarging lenses called the Apo-El-Nikkors.
The less expensive one sold for $2,300. These sold out of N.O.S. for many
years. When Nikon Special Optics finally ran low and investigated the
feasibility of another run in the mid -'90s, it was determined that the new
production would have to be retailed for $25,000 per lens! So of course the
product was "discontinued." In fact, it hadn't been made in decades.
Tooling sometimes forces these decisons to me be made. For instance, when
Mamiya discontinued the C330 TLR, it was because the old tooling had worn
out and would not stand another run. So the company had to make the decision
whether to re-tool. But that's expensive, and sales had been steadily
declining. For a while they said yes, they would, then no, then yes, and
finally they decided that future sales and profits would simply not repay
the investment, so the product (regretfully for Mamiya, since it was a
signature product) was allowed to be "discontinued." However, when Beseler
was forced to make the same decision with the 23C enlarger, it waffled in a
similar fashion for a bit, but it made the opposite decision, and that's why
we got the 23CIII.
Many times, when you buy new Pentax lenses or any other camera product, you
are not necessarily buying a product that has been newly manufactured. Nor
can you make meaningful assumptions about the sizes of production lines or
batch volumes based on annual sales figures.
--Mike >>
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