Transfer Pricing

He argues that idle capacity is worse since it has no contribution to overheads whereas a lower price above variable costs would have some positive contribution to the fixed costs and therefore improve profitability for the division. He believes a price of $40 is insufficient to cover the total costs and that the systems division does not want to subsidize the overheads of outside buyers.

If more is produced when it comes to the budget, the fixed cost would be favorable. I believe that the each unit would lower cost when it comes to production in units. But since the total fixed overhead is extended over a huge amount of units, this will cause a lower production in unit. Lastly, it will increase the

1. What is the competitive situation faced by Wilkerson? The critical product in term of market competition is the pumps of Wilkerson Company. The pumps are Wilkersons major product line with a production of about 12,500 units per month. Pumps currently have the lowest gross margin among all products, because competitors had been reducing prices on pumps and Wilkerson adopted its prices in order to remain competitive and to maintain the volume. 2. Given some apparent problems with Wilkersons cost system, should executives abandon overhead assignment to products entirely by adopting a contribution margin approach in which manufacturing overhead is treated as a period expense? Our conclusion is, that they should not adopt

The other option of reducing price or distributor's margin (to match GAFCEL's offering) may have a detrimental impact on the bottom line.

Allocating overhead costs is one of the important tasks and is necessary to be done by management accountant. One key reason is that in term of pricing strategies, many firms decide their products’ selling price based on their cost. And the selling price has to cover all the costs and profit.

Break even analysis can be used to decide whether to alter the existing product emphasis or not. For example in this case, if we refer last year’s data, we can see that the product C is not economically feasible to manufacture at $2.40 / unit. Following table gives the analysis for checking whether the company can afford to invest in additional “C” capacity.

Firstly, it is strategically beneficial for the company to continue to produce products A, C, and D. However, you should discontinue production of product B, as it is unprofitable and is losing the company money. Product B has been losing the company $2,307 per reel. If the company deems it is essential to keep producing product B in order to retain their customer base, we recommend changing the production schedule. For example, during times of lower demand, you can produce products such as B that do not make as much money, but you will still retain your customers’ business and satisfy their needs. During times of higher demand, by discontinuing the production of product B, the company will be able to produce the more profitable products such as A, C, and D.

First, we have identified if there is really an insufficiency in the amount of selling prices set by the Sales Department, in reference to Exhibit 1 of the case. We did this through identifying the maximum amount of overhead costs that the company can incur for the three products and comparing it with the total overhead costs. See Table 1 for details.

1. Atwater, Brian; Gagne, Margaret L; "The theory of constraints versus contribution margin analysis for product mix decisions ", Journal of Cost Management; Boston; Jan/Feb 1997

To sum up, if Superior reduces the price of product 101, its profit will increase significantly to breakeven.

Bargaining Power of Buyers: Buyers tend to have a high switching cost in regards to opportunity cost. If an athletic

Gupta's recommendation to use level annual production. Gupta believes that level production has two main advantages. First, under level production, Guna does not need seasonal hiring and layoff, thereby maintaining a more stable workforce. Secondly, level production can reduce the manufacturing risk, to decrease the profitability of equipment breakdown in peak season, due to a large amount of production request. The cost of equipment breakdown will be huge since Guna's production will be out of stock in the peak season. Based on Gupta's estimation, using level production will reduce the company's direct labor and other direct manufacturing cost from 34% to 29% of its purchases. The impact of Gupta's proposal is illustrated in Exhibit 8, Guna's note payables shows that company cannot clean up its

Upon analysis, it came to the fore that the current system had some obvious drawbacks which motivated the need for a new system. Under the old system, it was assumed that all customer orders placed the same demand on the resources of Kanthal. This was not accurate as customers differed by: the level of technical and commercial service they required, whether they demanded standard or non-standard products and by their ability to forecast their demand. Because of these discrepancies, under the old cost system an order which placed fewer demands on Kanthal's resources would be overcosted and appear to be unprofitable or less profitable than it was. This order would represent a hidden profit. Whereas, an order which placed a disproportionately large burden on the company's resources would appear to be more profitable than it was. This was a hidden loss order. Due to these hidden loss situations, many of Kanthal's resources were employed towards unprofitable products and customers.

Please discuss the possibilities of increasing Kamp’s profit by using the formula for basic cost per unit and by reorganizing. Please use a concrete example to indicate how the board of Kamp can manipulate the unit costs for the types 2, 3, and 4 by reorganizing its cost information system. How, do you think, can the boards of the Vecu concern and the MB division determine whether Kamp manipulates data on unit costs?

International market entry decision is often made in a rational manner, based on explaining of the costs of the transaction.