Eastern Company Currently Produces a Component That It Uses in Making

question 43

Essay

Eastern Company currently produces a component that it uses in making some of its products.The company has calculated the following costs for making the part: $\begin{array}{|l|r|}\hline \text { Unit-level costs } & \\\hline \text { Materials } & \$ 20 \\\hline \text { Labor } & 28 \\\hline \text { Overhead } & 2 \\\hline \text { Allocated facility-level costs } & 10 \\\hline \text { Total cost } & \$ 60 \\\hline\end{array}$ Eastern is considering outsourcing the component.A supplier has offered to sell the component to Eastern for $55 each.Eastern needs 10,000 units each year.If Eastern does outsource the component,it can use the facilities to make another product that would yield contribution margin of $60,000 per year.
Required:
1)Should Eastern outsource the component? Support your answer with appropriate computations.
2)What qualitative factors should be considered in this decision?

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Definitions:

Financial Markets

Systems or platforms enabling investors to trade financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, and currencies with each other.

Strong-form Efficient

A hypothesis suggesting that all information, both public and private, is reflected in a stock's price, making it impossible to consistently achieve higher returns.

Variance

A measure of the dispersion of a set of data points around their mean, often used in finance as a measure of the risk associated with a particular investment.

Average Squared Difference

A statistical measure calculated by averaging the squares of differences from a mean, often used in variance calculations.