Silven Industries, which manufactures and sells a highly successful line of summer lotions and insect repellents, has decided to diversify in order to stabilize sales throughout the year. A natural area for the company to consider is the production of winter lotions and creams to prevent dry and chapped skin.

After considerable research, a winter products line has been developed. However, Silven's president has decided to introduce only one of the new products for this coming winter. If the product is a success, further expansion in future years will be initiated.

The product selected (called Chap-Off) is a lip balm that will be sold in a lipstick-type tube. The product will be sold to wholesalers in boxes of 24 tubes for $10 per box. Because of excess capacity, no additional fixed manufacturing overhead costs will be incurred to produce the product. However, a $96,000 charge for fixed manufacturing overhead will be absorbed by the product under the company's absorption costing system.

Using the estimated sales and production of 120,000 boxes of Chap-Off, the Accounting Department has developed the following manufacturing cost per box:

Number of boxes of tubes manufactured by Silver Number of boxes of tubes purchased from the outside supplier