Why the huge increase in the price of Sonus Farber Amanti G5 speakers.

@ghdprentice is the only person in this thread or anyone else on this forum who has the slightest clue about how things actually work.  Without profits businesses fold, private entities in niche markets especially. The biggest overhead in any business is labor and benefits. The people who build SF speakers are extremely skilled craftsmen that are for the most part impossible to replace. Perhaps you’d want them built by robots which after the initial investment and those costs were amortized over several years doing so, would make them cheaper and more profitable which would provide more individuals for the unemployment lines and more burden on their fellow taxpayers.

So many of you have this sense idealism and entitlement that only concerns your own wallets that inevitably results in a decline of your quality of life not to mention all of you who don’t want to pay for music appreciation in their local schools because they consider it a needless expense and they don’t want their taxes to go up. Remember crap rolls downhill!

You sure are cynical. 

While there are a few companies that attempt and get away with charging "excessive" prices for their products, they are far between. Certainly not in tiny markets in highly discretionary markets. If folks don’t think the speakers are worth it, then they don’t buy them. Also, folks buying speakers in the $30K - $100k range are smarter than the average population, not dumber. 

I would think it more likely that a marketing person(s) from Sonus Faber / Bose did a complete analysis of the SF product lines and of the competitions. Considered the sonic characteristics, craftsmanship, global demographics, production costs and forecasted costs, and probably the Bose guidelines for profitability. They would have got together the COO, CFO, VP of Sales... probably the entire executive staff. The marketing team would have spent several hours explaining their findings and recommendations. The VP of Sales would complain endlessly about how they would not longer be able to sell the volumes they had committed to in the annual plan with these price increases. Everyone would look to purchasing to get long term contracts on raw materials to stabilize the material input costs. Anyway, I can go on and on. This is how it works. A huge amount of research and heated discussion by very savvy people trying to make sure they stay in business and make some money. 

Price gouging only works with commodities that are mandatory. Health care, food, water, power. 

 

.

@arafiq 

"Sales and operations planning" and "integrated business planning", yes and then there’s material requirements planning (MRP) that starts with a concept then an engineer’s drawing and the countless the individual pieces that will be required that go into the recipe which will require a bill of materials (BOM) which will be used in every step of manufacture but firstly, for the purchasing department to procure parts and supplies "just in time" to reach receiving dock and to receiving inspection. Then before the parts go into inventory they have to be reviewed for compliance which involves vendor certificates, verification of nomenclature, measurements, functional testing and material review board (MRB) with the quality control manager, the engineers involved in the design the buyers to ultimately determine "except or reject". It can be determined use the parts as is or return to vendor (RTV) which requires a return authorization (RA) for rework etc. long before any of it can go into stores waiting for the pickers to assemble the various pieces into kits which are either sent to the shop floor or maybe to a contract vendor for sub assembly and then returned to the receiving department for more of the above which part of  WPI or work in process.

I hope you get the picture but this doesn’t even scratch the surface of what is to come in the process of bringing a marketing concept to fruition and all the steps and people involved to make it happen. The variables are endless and all factor into the costs and what you can reasonably charge for a product that the market will support.

I was responding to you about assuming that only he knows what he’s talking about while others are just guessing. What he described is a typical process in business called sales and operations planning or integrated business planning. It’s standard fare in the business world. Lots of people on this forum are quite familiar with how that works :)