I note the comments directed at FLIR company readers.
There may be a sting the tail of this story though.
No inside information, but has anyone considered that FLIR may actually be making a LOSS on each sale of an E4 ? It may sound crazy but it is a valid business plan if you have other products offsetting the predicted loss, and you gain market dominance through the loss making product. Other products (not FLIR) have also been deliberately sold at a loss to squeeze out the competition.
If this is the case, the E4 sales will have been a major success but would also potentially have caused a deviation in the monthly predicted loss figure for the model against which not enough of the products making a profit will have been sold to offset the loss.
I am no accountant, but I know they wield a lot of power in companies. Lets hope they are happy with the situation.
I can't really see it being the case here - it's not like someone buying an E4 is in any way locked in and likely to produce future sales. Obviously the margin is a lot lower on the E4, and your chat with PASS indicates that dealer margins are also tight, but considering that TICs around this price and resolution (with higher res sensors) have been around a while, the price isn't so low as to be anywhere near implausible.
The detector is clearly a shared development from automotive applications, and probably also night-vision/consumer gun sights where size and weight are important.
We've seen that they have clearly leveraged a large proportion of the dev costs from earlier models, so most of the unique dev costs on the E series are PCB etc. and case mouldings.
..and if their aim is to gain market share by undercutting the competition, they've clearly succeeded way more (or at least faster) than they could have hoped for. The Fluke visible thermometer products looked pretty poor value when they came out, and are now just dead ducks until they slash the price substantially.
Probably a poor example but British Leyland lost money on every Mini they sold !
I think that one was down to cockup rather than conspiricy.