Archive for April, 2009

Demystifying the Profit Margins

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Many of the inventors who started because they wanted to know or wanted to be more creative freedom in their careers. It is rare to find someone who has been busy inventing something based on a spreadsheet. Many inventors are simply not comfortable with the numbers. ” However, if you create a viable product, you have to sell it. And the pricing and profit margins are a critical part of this process.

Whether you sell to end users or to a retailer or distributor who sells to customers directly, you must know how to fix the price of your product to ensure that everyone in the process achieve their required profit. As you probably imagine, this involves a bit of art – and lots of science.

Common sense requires that the price you choose not to be neither too high nor too low to attract more customers and generate the largest profit margin possible. Its price also has to cover the cost of managing the company. This is where understanding the fundamentals of profit margin can help.

Before talking about these concepts, I’d like to define some terms that people often do not include:

Retail trade: sales of a product for an end user. Example: the price you pay for cookies in a grocery store

Wholesale sales: this means sales to a retailer by a manufacturer or distributor. Example: Nabisco to charge a price for their groceries biscuits

Profit: This is the difference (reflected in so many U.S. dollars as a percentage) between what a dealer paid for a product and its retail price (what the end user pays). Example: Company XYZ sells biscuits a bag of cookies to the grocery store for $ 2, and the grocery store charges $ 5. The profit margin is $ 3 per bag.

Gross margin: This is the percentage of the proceeds of a transaction. (Both the manufacturer and the retailer will expect its gross margin.)

How operating profit margins
The best way to illustrate the concept of profit margin is a simple example. Suppose that you, the manufacturer produces a product called Gizmo, for $ 1. You sell it wholesale to a store for $ 3. Therefore, your profit is $ 2 ($ 3 – $ 1 = $ 2) or 200 percent (2 / 1 = 2.00: Remember, the percentages are determined by changing the place of decimal point two spaces to the right and adding the signal percentages, so 200% = 2.00). If the store sells Gizmo for $ 8, its profit margin is $ 5 ($ 8 – $ 3 = $ 5), or 166 percent (5 / 3 = 1.66).

Calculate your gross margin
Now that you know your profit margin, you can calculate your gross margin. (These two terms are often mistakenly used as if synonymous. They are related, but are not the same.) This number is calculated by dividing the profit margin for the price of purchase.

Using the previous example, calculate your gross margin as the first manufacturer. Divide your profit margin ($ 2) for the price the retailer paid for it ($ 3). Therefore, your gross margin as the manufacturer is 67 percent (2 / 3 =. 67). So in this case, a profit margin of 200% resulted in a gross margin of 67 percent.

You must also calculate the gross margin from its retail (explain why this is important in the next section). Calculate the same way, only using the profit margin of retail ($ 5) and price ($ 8). So: 5 / 8 =. 625, or 62.5 percent. Therefore, the profit margin of 166% of retail resulted in a 62.5% gross margin.

Retailer’s profit margin and gross margin
So why is it important to know the gross margin from its retail? Well, retailers often have a minimum margin requirements so this will help determine what price you set. Although the requirements vary widely depending on the type of retail is common that a retailer expect a gross margin of 50 percent. This is often called a margin keystone or key.

An easy way to calculate this number is double its wholesale price. For example, if you sell your product to retail for $ 5, the retailer will need to charge consumers $ 10 for a keystone margin. When you have to work backwards to calculate a forward price is the retail margin to its desired, it is useful to use the keystone margin of 50% as a starting point.

Another important thing to know is that retailers of luxury products often require a higher gross margin. So do not be shy to ask their requirements and its dealers – is how retailers think. Most buyers with more experience can give you a specific number or at least an idea of what they expect.

Now it is clear, or at least less cloudy, I will add another ingredient to the soup: distributors.

Gross Dealer Margin
Distributors are companies that buy products (and stocks of the shop) and manufacturers typically sell to retailers. Are commonly used by larger retailers that handle a large volume of products such as grocery stores.

The distributor’s margin requirements vary depending on the price, industry segment, country and size, but are typically lower than retail – 20 to 40 percent is common. That’s because, as the broker, there are two required margins – the distributor and the retailer.

For example, the margins for a product sold through a dealer could be something like this (assuming a 50% gross margin for the retailer and a 30% gross margin for the distributor):

Gross Margin = MB
$ 10 retail price – sold by the retailer to the consumer (MB = 50% of retail)
Wholesale price of $ 5 – sold by the distributor to a retailer (distributor MB = 30%)
Price Distribution of $ 3.50 – sold by the dealer you (MB = 43% of the manufacturer) $ 2 – the cost to produce the product

How much is enough?
There is a gross margin “magic” as a goal – and vary dramatically by industry type. Even within a single industry, fluctuate. A large manufacturer can be satisfied with 20 to 30 percent or less. In a huge volume of sales can be profitable with this cup. However, many smaller companies are struggling to achieve a margin of 50 to 70% gross. Here are some strategies to calculate where yours should fall.

In the upper, its gross margin should be as high as you can put it. The factors influencing this are their own production costs, expectations of the retail margin and the price in the market that your product will sell (the latter number is the most important). So if your production cost is extremely low and your product has so much demand that you can sell it at a gross margin of 1000%, Do it!

And the low? When is your gross profit margin too low to sustain the cost of managing the company? The answer lies in their objectives and costs. Remember that all of the costs, including salaries, rent, marketing and other promotional costs must be covered by the gross margin earned on sales. There is a term for that, too – “net profit margin, or percentage of money left after paying all these costs plus the costs of production. So what is an adequate margin of net profit?

Let’s use this as an example: suppose you can get a return of 8 to 10% in bonds and equities in the market, without much risk or effort. You may conclude that you have to overcome the return on any investment of capital (investment in your company). In other words, if you can easily make 8 per cent in shares, you’ll want to make a higher net margin on their business, since you are putting much time, effort and risk.

And now we return to the gross margins for the company. You know it is too low when you discover you can not cover the costs to operate your business. In this case, you have two options: find a way to lower your production costs, or up the price.

A final factor to keep in mind: its gross margin could grow with time. Prinicipales stages in the production cycles are often smaller (and therefore, costs more per unit). In addition, you have to create demand for their product so you do not want to set your price too high. Therefore, you may not have earnings at the beginning get a sense while the market and drive sales. Then, as their demand begins to grow, production costs decrease and its gross margin will grow.

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