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Business English vocabulary · Numbers and Money

Unit cost

Meaning in business english, with examples

nounCommon term

In business english, unit cost means: The cost of producing, buying, or delivering one single item, service unit, or measurable amount.

In Turkish: birim maliyet

How it is used

Used in pricing, manufacturing, procurement, and logistics. It helps compare suppliers, measure efficiency, and estimate margins per item.

Example sentences

  1. If shipping stays this high, our unit cost for each sample kit will exceed the price approved by procurement.

    Here the term refers to the full cost attached to one sample kit, which affects whether the approved price still works.

  2. The factory lowered unit cost by reducing packaging waste, not by changing the materials in the product.

    In this example, the phrase measures cost per product and shows efficiency gains from the production process.

Common collocations

  • reduce unit cost
  • unit cost analysis
  • average unit cost
  • unit cost per item
  • budgetThe amount of money that a company, team or project plans to spend over a period of time, or the plan that shows this.
  • estimateA careful guess at a number, cost or amount of time, based on the information you have; also a written statement of the likely price of a job.

More terms: Numbers and Money

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