Mt Spokane Photography said:
This gives a hint as to the actual manufacturing costs of a camera. I have assumed 20% of the MSRP, but for High End cameras, it may be lass than that.
Not even close. The general rule (of course it varies depending on the exact specification, market, what factories are already geared up for, etc) is that bodies — both stills and video — make about £50 profit for every £1000 they cost street, making a final profit of about 5%. (That's GBP; convert to whatever currency you like, the percentage is the same everywhere.) In other words, if a shop is selling a 6D body for £1000, they probably bought it from Canon for £900-950. This is why shops push second hand gear so much. (Just as second hand instruments are a big deal to music stores, second hand video games and hardware is a big deal with computer and game stores, etc.)
Canon's pricing to the shops tends to represent around 150% of the total production costs of the unit. Again, a
general guide is they aim to double their money on the physical parts, but then the gigantic costs of R&D and advertising eats up a big chunk. So if they are selling a body to a shop for £950, it most likely cost Canon about £475 to provide that one unit and they'll have made about £300 profit. (The remaining £175 being representative of what was eaten up to develop the body, advertise it to the public, advertise it to the stores, cost of storing stock until it's shipped, etc.)
Now, this does all go up in favour of the manufacturer as you go toward the higher-end units. I mentioned the 6D before because it's middle-of-the-pack and so a good measuring stick for the industry overall. For something like the C300 II, which is inherently a more expensive piece of kit (but also not the absolute top of the market), Canon likely is making a little more money off of it. Shops themselves are likely making just the same percentage; maybe 7%, perhaps even 10% if they wrangled a really good deal. With the C300 II, Canon themselves are most likely doubling their money. Still not as good as your 20% production cost estimate, but a production cost of 50% is very likely and about as good as Canon could hope.
Of course, as I stressed before, there are exceptions to this. Obviously if you're buying a camera at launch you're paying the highest price you ever could for that body, and that usually includes a little extra profit for both the manufacturer and the store. Some really, really specialist bodies will also have massively inflated prices, obviously. Every now and then production costs will lower and the manufacturer won't lower their price for distributors right away, taking in a little increased profit for a while. Some markets pay a higher rate than others, too. But the above
general guidelines apply for
the majority of situations.
Bear in mind that it and has always been lenses which make money, not bodies. Not in stills and not in video. Bodies are pushed because they are where the fastest advancements are being made and where all the advertising-friendly buzzwords are; megapixels, 4K, frame rates, autofocus points, etc. It's hard to advertise lenses but easy to advertise bodies. Bodies then drive lens sales. Hence, manufacturers accept making relatively little profit on bodies of all types, so that in turn more lenses will sell, which is where the real profit is.
Taking $6000 off the C300 II most likely represents a timely pairing of a reduced production cost and potential competition. It's unlikely to be just one. Either way, the ratio of production cost:street price will have remained roughly the same.
(Source: being very friendly with many stores, distributors, and manufacturer PR and marketing teams. No, you will not find this information in a convenient easy-to-Google URL or on Wikipedia.)
