So what other component in the chain of selling a GTX 780 is bigger than Nvidia's revenue share of that product?
no one component has the lions share, that is the entire point, everyone in the chain will be wanting to make a good margin, a bare minimum of 20% and more like 30 or even 40% margin on premium components
if nvidia charge $150 for the GPU, the AIB adds on say $50 of costs and then a 30% margin = $285, a distro wants 30% (lets ignore shipping costs as per container you are probably only talking £1-2 per item) = $408 and the retailer wants 30% too which comes to $583
not far short are we?
if you manage to cut out the distributor then you are buying in less bulk so the AIB's margin will be higher and so will the retailers, if you are buying less than container quantities then your cost of shipping goes up by quite a large factor as well, and given that you probably want your goods in place quicker than 1-2months on the sea then you are talking air freight which will be even more expensive again
the distributor I used to work for would never go below 25% margin because it would cost roughly 20% of it's turnover to service the business, so anything less than 20% was a "loss" in real terms, ideally you wanted to be making 30-40% on small volume business and 25% reserved for frequent pallet quantity business
if you are making 30% margin, a 10% discount on price comes straight off your bottom line, so it's a 30% reduction in profit
if anything I would say the AIB's would want a higher than 30% margin as well, I've seen anything up to 80% manufacturer margin (not on GPU's I hasten to add) when I've managed to get an insight in to their costs (it is amazing how often a manufacturer will send out distributor pricing and forget to delete their internal cost structure tabs from a spreadsheet for example)
