Volume. How many anvils is your buddy having cast?
he only does a couple hundred a year at most. but foundry costs for iron dont go down that much with volume.
but bandsaws, especially big industrial ones, are hardly a big volume consumer item. Do-All probably only makes a few hundred a year, and that would include a wide range of machines. Amada is much more known for its half million dollar turret punch/ laser machines, and, again, its not like a production line that runs off 1000 a day.
All machine tools are low volume, high cost products.
Haas is the biggest manufacturer in the USA of machine tools- and they made around 13,000 machines last year, and that was probably 50 different models, if not more. There are certainly some Haas machines they only make ten of in a year.
Same thing with bigger bandsaws- even the biggest companies in the world may only make a few of certain models every year.
I have seen Amada slabbing bandsaws, like their VM 3800, which will take a 6 ton workpiece, in action- amazing machines, but there is certainly no volume discounts on those- if they sell 2 dozen a year, globally, I would be amazed.
Certainly, there is volume discounts on the 4x6 chinese bandsaws- and chinese government subsidies. Because even those POS should cost more than 2 or 3 hundred bucks.
But new machine tools cost a minimum of five bucks a pound pretty much anywhere, and, often, much more.