You gotta look through the company marketing speak. Usually you...

You gotta look through the company marketing speak. Usually you don't tell a customer to bugger off we don't want you. It's the customer who decides to leave.

So I would expect unless they were idiots or had really good reasons, that when the low margin contract renewals came up, the sales person would have said to them something along the lines of "Hey mate hope you liked our product for the last year, that was on introductory pricing, this year we need to raise prices to cover our costs and make a reasonable profit. Hope you can stay with us." So at this point the customer will either says, no thanks we don't need your product anymore, or hey that's a big increase, how about $X /pound instead. At this point you should have quoted a high enough starting price to negotiate a good price at which you makes good profits. The customer may still walk away.