[BennyB]

You're not just paying for the materials either (plastic, componentry, glass etc), you're paying for a lot of R&D, specialised equipment to develop each part (plastic moulding machines, moulds, production runs for making parts - it costs a lot for example to make widget A in a D4 then to reset the machines to make Widget B in a Mosquito), salaries, wages, useful life of assets, cost of finance, sales team, marketing team, business analysts to decide whether they should even bother making a D4 or if it's a loss making design, software experts to design the computer aspects... the list goes on and on which is why the cheapest looking watch can cost a small fortune.

Of course they have to add their own margin on to make it profitable as well, and they have to decide how many will be sold, how much it costs to make that many and therefore what price they can set to achieve their margin.

The best way to get a cheap Suunto would be to work for Suunto. Second best option is to wait and get one second hand. £300 is a bit hard for me to justify at the moment when I already have 2 working D3's, but they might come down in price a bit later down the track, particularly if something supercedes the D4.

Cheers,
Ben