Wolf_XL wrote
...well, I’m assuming that Silverprint doesn’t keep its prices so low and throw in extras out of pure philanthropy...
This is quite an old topic. I actually thought everyone knew about it. Harman has been favouring the domestic market for years (I’ve been following this for 20 years now).
UK retailers are allowed to buy
directly from Harman. The rest of the world – including us – are not. In the UK, prices are therefore so low that not even Foma is sold in significant quantities. They are, so to speak, factory-direct prices.
So the rest of us always have at least one middleman plus freight costs to contend with.
The whole thing fluctuates with the exchange rate and is sometimes more pronounced, sometimes less so.
Our prices are around 25% below the official German prices. For example, 8x10 inch 100-sheet packs are listed at 117 EUR by the official German distributor.
We then make a profit of around 15–20%. Our costs in retail distribution are around 25% and are rising year on year due to the sharp increase in wages in Germany.
We have been making a loss on almost all Ilford products in accounting terms (not in absolute terms) since around 2008.
A few items, such as filters, are excluded from this.
