[xyzzy123]

Oh man, all those years back I made a choice between antminer and butterfly labs. I backed the wrong horse.

BFL mined with customer hardware and basically didn't ship units to customers until there was no profit in running one.

Crypto ASICs are a super weird edge case IMHO in chips, strictly speaking it's not rational to sell them if they are very profitable. It only makes sense if the customer has a different risk profile than you; or the customer can somehow get power more cheaply than you; or you have some kind of scam going on; or you couldn't get capital except by presales and are unusually honest.

Note that an additional profit-making option for crypto ASIC producers is to secretly over-produce and compete with your customers and you are unlikely to get caught doing this.

[imtringued]

That isn't correct. If the ASIc manufacturer produce them for X can use them directly and it only costs Y to operate them for Z profit. Then you can price them as Z-Y-profit_margin > X. The lower the operating cost, the higher your profit margin per chip if you sell it. Selling the chip might have a 50% profit margin and mining has a 10% profit margin. If you wanted to get into mining you would build a holding company owning both types of companies.