DISCO-F429ZI: How can this board be that cheap

Mbed OS
1

Hi everyone.
Looking for some board and mcu to prototype a hs usb system and saw the DISCO-F429ZI board.
It does much more than i’d need, but that would be fine anyway.
On Radiospares, it is about 30€. I looked at the BOM, ( http://www.st.com/st-web-ui/static/active/en/resource/technical/document/bill_of_materials/stm32f429i-disco_bom.zip ) and tried to check the price i could get.
If radiospares sells the board at 30€, knowing they are damn expensive, i expect them to buy it below 15€.

At that price, and even at 20€, i don’t know how they manage to build it, except by loosing money.
It is a big problem to me. That board looked interesting, but i do not need the display and some items. I thought i could build it for around 25€ myself, but the CPU is already over 12€, even when buying from CN. I feel cheated.

Any hint on how to manage lower prices for small batches? What price would you get for such a board without display?

Thank you.

2

The key is in volume. If you just need one, you’ll pay 12 GBP but if you buy at least 5000 the price drops to 6.2 GBP. Farnell even offers as little as 500+ for under 7 GBP Probably will go even lower if you buy them straight from ST, instead of through a European distributor (although that comes with more volume constraints).