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' t

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...