Chinese manufacturers, heavily subsidized by their own government and relying on vast economies of scale, have helped send the price of conventional solar panels plunging and grabbed market share far more quickly than anyone anticipated.
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There is clearly a possible application here for SMEs, especially as economies of scale push the price down as more cards are ordered.
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An interview published last year in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists detailed how at age 88, he was working on a new approach to photovoltaic thin-film production that he said would allow factories to make enough solar panels in a year to produce at least one gigawatt of electricity annually roughly the scale of a nuclear power plant at the price of coal.
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Stephanie Gallo says her family's firm can profitably mine both ends of the price scale.
That's a lot of money, he admits, but says economies of scale will drive the price down quickly.
When it comes to buying e-books at the high end of the price scale, consumers have no trouble doing so.
In another view, a system of micro-tasking rather than a full-time job means that it is too small a scale to really price out the cost of these benefits on a per task level.
Japan had pushed product design and the assembly-line genius of Henry Ford to new heights, which let it scale up volume and push down the price of Old Economy products.
"On a scale of 1-10 measuring asset price 'irrationality, ' we are probably at a 6 and moving in an upward direction" he wrote.
The Flash-based tool in one example showed a map of London, and with the touch of a sliding scale you see areas of the city where housing is a certain price and commute times are a specific length.
Another way of reducing the price of meat is to aim for economies of scale when it comes to slaughter.
The most frequent instigators of such large scale disruptions are corrupted price signals or war and its aftermath.
Separate factories allow for more variation, but at the price of fewer economies of scale.
Fewer users means lower production rates, so economies of scale are lost leading to further price increases.
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In the tech-hardware business, competition over price is really a function of scale: firms with higher volume can make things more cheaply.
Even larger leaps in sizing technology are being made by companies like Acustom Apparel, which uses 3D body scanners along with pattern-making software to scale the creation of custom-fitted clothing at a digestible price point.
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This might make sense for large scale solar farms, since the integration of PV would allow the overall price of power to be lower than CSP alone, while CSP would be able to compensate for the rapid output changes from PV that occur whenever a cloud passes over, as well as producing power at night, or shifting it ot peak afternoon periods.
Amazon built unparalleled warehousing, distribution and customer management economies of scale that still exert, by some estimates, a 19% price advantage over Walmart.
Worries that investors may balk at a company with such baggage has forced underwriters Goldman Sachs Asia and China International Capital Corp. to scale down the size of the offering and cut the stock's asking price.
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In fact, what is the ROI outlook on Wal-Mart as it remodels stores in price competitive international markets and tries to gain greater economies of scale overseas?
By manipulating interest rates on such an unprecedented scale the Federal Reserve has effectively destroyed the ability of our credit markets to genuinely price the borrowing and lending of money.
The price of anything has three components: supply, demand and the scale used for measurement.
The authors say that they expect the use of highly toxic methods will continue to grow among small-scale miners as the price for gold continues to rise.
And Incapsula offers SMEs a coop deal thousands of SMEs that become its customers can benefit from economies of scale and get big company system protection and performance improvement at a much lower price.
One display case, called "The Price of a Life, " brings the whole business down to a microeconomic scale, and features perhaps the most disturbing artifacts.
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Brewers, further hit by higher costs for key raw materials and packaging, and price deflation in the supermarket sector, are joining together to achieve economies of scale.
And as with every other type of digital hardware, the price will only fall from there as manufacturers continue to scale up and to refine their production processes.
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Price Waterhouse Coopers said the trust "lacked transparency" in its reporting of the scale of cash problems.
While the XPS One is starting out at a premium price, Del Prete predicts Dell will be able to drop the XPS One's price quickly--much more so than Apple could--by taking advantage of the scale of its operations.
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