If the cost of manufacture and shipping goes down, and the price stays the same, the company makes more money and it isn't immediately obvious to the consumer that anything changed.
Yes and no. The costs of manufacturing may go down but it doesn't mean that it will be passed down to the consumers.
Generally speaking, selling cheaper is a bad business decision. It will increase costs and decrease earnings, you don't want to do that as a business. Prices should go up, not down.
In this specific case, we're talking about a niche brand appealing to an affluent audience. They milk their customers to give them good conscience. The price can't go down, that's against the business model.
For very low quantities, the price difference won't matter much..
If you're selling hundreds of thousands or millions of something, suddenly that is real money that justifies the incremental increase of engineering effort to use a cheaper part.
Right now they have no need to lower prices. They can hold their lower production costs as a threat to any competitor who might be tempted to enter a price war, without ever needing to actually lower their prices.
At no point will the manufacture or distributers sell at a loss unless it's for strategical reasons. Perhaps the prices will go up in the countries with lower purchasing power, but it's bound to go down in the countries with higher purchasing power. That may or may not be intentional, but it's clearly possible to sell it at the low price, so they could just do that.
If more people are willing to buy the product for a lower price and due to better economies of scale / amortized cost of development the margins also improve then of course they may lower the price.
these things would've cost next to nothing to make, and they figure they can sell a large enough volume at a low price that they'd net more than upping the price slightly and selling substantially less.
Some companies will literally sell products for less than the cost of the components that go into them.
Sometimes that's a supermarket selling 'loss leaders' to get people into the store where they'll hopefully buy other things - or a games console manufacturer planning to make up the loss because they get paid for every game sold.
Other times a manufacturer wants to hit a promised launch date, and hopes to get manufacturing costs down later. Maybe they haven't had time to set up certain cost-saving automation, or a planned lower-cost component wasn't ready in time for launch. Maybe their widget supplier has promised a lower cost when they're ordering 10,000 a month but right now they're only ordering 500 a month.
Of course, without access to insider information we can only guess if this is really occurring...
>it's more accurate prices for non-consumers (suppliers)
More accurate prices for suppliers means they can produce with less capital risk, which is generally also good for consumers since the consumers don't have to pay more to give the supplier as large a safety cushion. This has been historically true, it's basic economics, and it's empirically true in the literature.
Think if you produce a product, and there's a lot of risk in your supply chain. You need to charge more for your end product to account for that risk. This can be and is measured.
Remove risk (whether it's credit, inflation, pricing, stability, etc.), and the supplier has less risk.
This is never purely going to profits, since your competitors generally also have the same risk landscape. So any gains perhaps help profits, but some are also used in other sectors of the business - selling cheaper to try and grab market share, better wages to attract better employees, and so on.
> if the competitors can lower it nearly at the same time and you get negligeable additional sales
If you and all your competitors lower prices then likely more of the entire sector of products makes more sales as more people can afford the product. This has been the pattern since the original Luddites - when textile prices dropped from automation the entire sector exploded and produced around 10x as many goods. This too has been the pattern across history and industries.
Well, for one, supply & demand says you would sell more of the gadget if it was priced lower. If not, you'd keep it the same price and enjoy wider margins.
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