The profit is in the ink rather than the printer. There are two issues with someone coming into the market with a cheap printer/ink.
1) It's hard for any business to keep selling a product at 10% profit margin when you know you can sell it for 200% profit margin with the price increase not affecting sales.
2) In the rare situation that a business would accept low margins 'just to be nice to the customer' - they'll just get bought out. It's hard to not accept 10 years of profit for a business when it's being offered to you.
You've clearly not experienced the reality of enterprise then. You're opinions are based on a limited understanding and knowledge of real life situations when it comes to this sort of stuff.
Never thought about that. According to Mr Google; believed to come from the Latin phrase “quid pro quo,” which translates into "something for something," or an equal exchange for goods or services.
"And yeah, 80 million pounds of profit last year. I'd buy that for a dollar"
In business, last years profits are often irrelevant. This is a good example. It's a constant treadmill of trying to stay profitable - which isn't as easy as it sounds.
More so when businesses of this size are usually built on owing large sums of money.
I'm not sure you understand what's happening here or the basics of business and liquidation.
"Normal companies can't go bankrupt in one day" - They didn't go bankrupt. They went into liquidation. Massively different thing. You can have a company with billions of quid saved up in the bank that goes into liquidation.
Liquidation is quite common and happens daily in the UK to 'normal' companies. Companies that were profitable last week and no longer can operate as they're not profitable enough to pay their debts/what they owe.
I think your issue here is you don't understand what liquidation is/means and basic principles of business profits. The most important part is that while a company may be profitable at the 'end of year' -- They have to first get to the end of the year.
The token £1 is just a payment requirement for ownership. The bidding process for insolvent companies is essentially who will take on the most "problems" for the best outcomes for the business.
So one company may bid saying they want to acquire X parts of the company but can not take on the advertising arm or the quality assurance part of the company; which means jobs losses etc. Another company may say we'll acquire all of the company but not the freehold properties the business owns.
The liquidation team then have to decide which bid offers the best likely outcome for the creditors/business. The £1 isn't technically what they're paying for the company, as they're taking on debt, leaseholds, pension funds etc. Their bid is technically tens or hundreds of millions depending on the situation.
It's free in most EU countries. I've never paid for a bank transfer. The third party doing the transaction gives me some protection that I wouldn't otherwise have.
Can't argue against the anonymous part of it but when the transaction is between me, the seller and the bank, I'm not sure why it would need to be anonymous.
What you said doesn't make sense. The seller requested the buyer to pull the money out of the bank into cash and then immediately deposited that cash into their bank account. What would be the reason for doing that?
Doesn't make sense unless you've worded what happened incorrectly by accident.
Unfortunately we wouldn't move forward as a society if we didn't do things that affected people that didn't want to progress with modern ways of living.