4 ms·

For me its the same as pharma. Can you tell me if a government (ex India) would like to devote resources to make cheaper ultrassounds they wouldn't be able to?

• bayesian_horse 10y ago
  With pharma I think the main "cost" involved is about the risk of investment. It takes billions of Dollars to potentially make billions of Dollars from a single product. More likely you invest hundreds of millions of Dollars with no return at all. It takes a special kind of company, almost a bank, to stomach that kind of risk. And this extraordinary risk also demands extraordinary rewards. Medical technology isn't really the same thing.
  • frozenport 10y ago
    The assessment of pharma isn't true, and is evidenced by their high profit margins along with price difference between different markets - same exact thing is substantially cheaper in the EU than in the USA.
• temac 10y ago
  How do you pay R&D engineers, prototypes, production, sales, support, etc... with such a low quantity volumes if the price is on the same order as the BOM? Actually, depending on your precise definition of "same order", I could argue it already is. And while the gross margin will seem high if you are only used to consumer stuff, this is an almost useless metric for low volumes, where the net margin do not necessarily follow. There are also not a ton of different vendors, so even dreaming about mutualizing some R&D costs (and that will mostly not happen), you would not save a lot. Once again, cheap portable machines (but not able to do a lot) already exists.