Re: the discussion on how analysts generate cost breakdowns. This is part of what I do for a living so I have some insight perhaps.
These are usually put together from multiple 'channel checks'. If a company like Megachips, which makes hardware for Nintendo, has shipped xxx chips to Nintendo and posted xxx sales on those chips, you know how much they are charging Nintendo for each chip. If the company in question supplies multiple components but posts a single sales figure, the analyst has to do some more legwork i.e. asking a company IR guy straight-up how much they got paid for each unit of a given component.
Usually this stuff falls under NDA or securities trading regulations, but IR guys are generally keen to paint rosy pictures of their mega-sales to hot console manufacturers, so will usually let it slip somehow, often as a range rather than a specific figure and often with a 'do not quote me' dictum. If they don't oblige, the analyst will go to non-official sources within the company i.e. plant managers or other middle-managers. The analyst can still use these figures or ranges in their own estimates - they just won't cite them as being directly from the company.
In many cases, the analyst will come at a given input cost from multiple angles, trying to pin down both the hardware cost directly from the manufacturer and the sum-of-the-parts of all the various component costs.
So it depends to a large extent on how good the analysts' sources are, and how much they are trusted. In many cases, an analyst will know EXACTLY but be unable to say that without losing his source, so will fuzz it up a bit.
