"... Smith says, he made a report showing the Unifill syringe...

"... Smith says, he made a report showing the Unifill syringe would cost 90 cents each (figuring on 50 million made yearly). Sanofi was then expecting to pay 50 cents ..."
Time to wake up children, and smell the coffee!

abdm...that's not fair to use that example to suggest its a house of cards. It IS rightly a problem with becoming commercial

Be critical of the facts of the statement...

"... Scrambling to account for the discrepancy between the figures, Smith says Shortall ordered them to suppress the analysis projecting the 90-cent cost."

Some wizards at play. The only thing in that statement that has merit and needs to be considered is "figuring on 50 million made yearly"

VERY FEW companies are ever able to charge what they want for a ddvice, be it a phone or a shoe when they are not manufacturing in large volume.

Its fair enough to base the unit cost on 75% utilisation of your one machine. So payback of all business ocsts against 50MM a year Unifill manufacture will make the accountants scream we need to charge more.

Fact is as a company commercialising its tech then it is likely to have based the Unifill cost on ????who knows??? but lets say 300MM syringes a year. If they are selling that many then they can make a few dollars selling them at 55c. But whilst they are ramping up production they are not able to sell units to cover all business costs so have to wear the growing pains of growing the market and sales that whilst they are not meeting volume targets they are not going to be making a profit on the each sale. All they will be doing is plugging some of the leaks by offseting most of the cost of manufacture and some of the non money spinning company divisions.

SO...sure, if you think its fair to criticise that the sale price at pilot plant scale isnt sustainable long term than ok.

For me anyway the real question at what volume are they basing their forecast and pricing. If its 600MM then yikes I am on board with you. If its 200-400MM then cool...lets get some more contracts on board and get the volume up.