I don't work for Apple, so I have no idea of their costs. I did however work for a medium-sized company with a similar business model (design in US, build in Ch

I don't work for Apple, so I have no idea of their costs. I did however work for a medium-sized company with a similar business model (design in US, build in China, drop-ship worldwide). While they were nowhere near the size of Apple (total market cap was about $2 billion) their costs of operating in the UK were certainly a lot higher than 1% per unit - they were typically around 20%. I realise that Apple has astronomically large economies of scale, but they also do a lot of UK advertising and have a lot of physical stores. A lot of the costs for the firm I was working for were on things like customer service, wastage (as in fixing and replacing broken units), rates (UK local government tax on commercial properties), etc.