And did you honestly, really ask if the €50,000 Orpheus is profitable for Sennheiser? I take back my previous post, I actually have two bridges to sell you. They are producing 250 of them per annum. Provided they're confident they'll sell them all, that means they'll be taking revenue of around €12.5 MILLION per annum just on the Orpheus alone. The fact that you think they might be loss leaders is genuinely laughable to me.
First of all, I think you are way off on your sales expectations. Being familiar with some other high end gear, like the Fostex HP-V8, original Orpheus production, etc. - these things tend to sell in the tens/hundreds. I believe Fostex made about ~30 total HP-V8, it took Sennheiser years to sell the original 300 unit Orpheus at half the price (including inflation). Once you get into tens of thousands of dollars, your market size is very small.
That said, I think you are doubly unfamiliar with costs associated with paying for research and development. Even if on the conservative side, it only took about 10 man years of development effort to come up with the HE 1060 - we are talking maybe a team of 5 over a couple years - that's already a million in salaries alone given a conservative estimate of 100,000/yr blended average salaries. Not to mention, Sennheiser invested a lot in marketing as it is a statement product, promotional materials, etc. Perhaps up to 2 million budgeted for that alone.
Let's also consider the BoM + manufacturing cost to be about 10k, given the custom marble enclosure, an extremely high end totally custom tube amplifier (on par with things like the HP-V8 which retailed for 10 grand, almost assuredly a money losing proposition for Fostex), and dedicated custom manufacturing for electrostatic components which share absolutely nothing with anything else they make.
These are very very conservative estimates.
So they would need to sell about 66 of these things just to break even. I doubt they will sell that many (given the sales rate of the original Orpheus + the 2x price differential). I think a more likely total production run number is closer to half (probably much less) - 150 units.
But if my estimates are conservative, and I think they are, I doubt even if they sell 150 will they recoup their costs. Alex Grell mentioned the Orpheus development took upwards of 10 years, and started with 5 engineers. 5 engineers + Alex as product manager = 60 man years of investment (about right by my guess, if we include ebbs and flows in development and a mad rush of a much larger team towards launch). If we double our salary estimate (take 20 years instead of 60), double our marketing estimate (4 million of marketing for a flagship halo product - yet right), and double the BoM/manufacturing cost (20k per unit on a almost entirely hand built custom manufacturing with almost zero shared components), you will not recoup your investment even with half the Orpheus HE90 units sold (you'd need to sell 166).
The point of a halo product like the HE-1 isn't profit, but rather to make a statement and attract people to buy other headphones that you make. How many people read about the HE-1 and decided to try high end headphones like the HD 600? That is priceless to Sennheiser, as those customers turn into life long fans.
Gorilla glass in mobile phones is in BoM analyst reports as costing around $3 per unit. Even third party vendors sell genuine replacement Gorilla Glass for around $15, and that's for large 6+" pieces. Given that Sennheiser will likely be producing a few thousand of these HD820 units, even on custom glass pieces you can bet the manufacturering cost will barely make a dent to the overall margin of the product.
This is a surprising comment from you if you are familiar with manufacturing. Phones have standard sized screens and standard requirements for fitting into that form factor. Flat, rectangular. Corning measures these kind of unit sales in the billions. How many of those applications are convex, spherical, shaped in a 3-d pane, and meet the size standards of the HD 820, in the application that Sennheiser uses it? Zero. Sennheiser's couple of hundred units will mean Corning needs a dedicated manufacturing line, dedicated training, and dedicated expertise in manufacturing what? 300 units? Assuming that is in any way equivalent to overstock sold by third parties is absurd. It's almost like saying the windshield in the Ford GT uses gorilla glass, so you'd only spend max 15$ on a replacement windshield. (For the record, a replacement Aston Martin windshield will run you about 4 grand, I imagine the Ford GT custom gorilla glass panel is quite a bit more).
