I would think thats the real fact behind the sudden reduction in retail price. The slow acceptance of this model may have something to do with the fact it's a non-revenue wagon i.e. usually standing around clogging some yard tracks as most civil engineers stock do...? I for one have never built any "tjenestevogne" as we call them, and probably never will. (The effort going into a scratchbuilt 7 mm wagon is too much just to have it standing around on the club layout ;-) For some reason the british market does not accept the continental price level, hence I buy all my parts in the UK. (and in 7 mm the cont. prices can be horrendous...)
Some of it has to do with the business model used by most modern firms: Get the capital invested back within say, six months or 1000 items over the counter. The rest is icing on the company cake. We should not complain though, over Heljan's service to the danish market. Over the last ten years they've given us 3 diesels (classes MX, MY and the MY 1200 series) 3 coaches, a mail van and a number of goods vehicles. This does not include the IC 3 and MS-Lyntog (DEMU) which were put on the market before they had their technical side sorted out. My guess is the danish market is about 1/1000 of the british, probably smaller. And yes, there is competition, at least two serious -danish- firms compete with Heljan, even ROCO and others show an interest -mostly because the german market is rather sluggish these days.
-Søren