not wanting to get into a politics debate so lets talk basic economics. The prices of the goods for example are set by the market - that is us, the buyers. Sellers for example have a % of every sale that needs to be divided along the lines of cost (wages, building the product, rates, goods and services etc), development (R&D), re-investment, tax ( and remember there is an ongoing GST at every line of supply, remember 'the never ever ever GST' that turned me and every other business owner into a tax collector - but I digress) and things called 'invisibles' (insurance, duties, freight, exchange rate fluctuations etc, advertising). Once that's all covered we then can look at profit. Detector sales are in reality a very small and niche market, some of the very few better detector makers sell to the military, police etc but the market is still quite small.
Then we get to 'what is the buyer willing to pay' after calculating the basic cost per unit is actually worth. Its a simple matter of supply and demand that is mathematically calculated - what price will I set to reach the equilibrium of manufacture vs sales and profit. Then we get the big imponderable - competition. A Ford and a Holden are (were) pretty much the same and very about the same price. Throw in the same type of car by a different manufacturer with a lower price then bang - sales drop. But, is there a comparable maker of, in this case, a PI detector that people will want. If it was all about cost, why isn't the whites TDI OZ outselling GPX5000? Because we, the buyers, do our research based on what we can afford and what we want to do. I want a premium grade PI detector. Some folk cant afford these so they will buy a compromise detector in their price range and good luck to them as they are buying a decent bit of kit.
My point is, if a seller is going to have a crack at a competitor (as is the case in this ad) they better be able to back it up with deeds, not words. I am not associated with minelab in any way and trust me, if whites or whoever came up with a PI that equalled or beat its minelab or garrett equivalent for a cheaper price then I would use their product. I await with baited breath a field report from an independent user running these PIs side by side on the same ground and conditions with the results verified.