Take the server business, notoriously low-margin, about 5%. Let's say a server sells for $10k to the customer, there is no way 5k of it is raw material and manufacturing, not even close. If you add supply chain and transportation on top, it's still way less than 50%. So sales and marketing is a big part of it, because where did the money go otherwise. Now I'm in marketing, I know we don't that much on marketing, so to say the rep commission is 10% is totally believable.
Let's look at another tech product, say Network gear. That's a higher margin business, say about 40% is profit. Cisco is the undisputed leader there. The annual report is an approximation, because certainly not everything they sell is networking, but the vast majority of it is. So looking at the annual report is close to analyzing the cost of a piece of network gear. If you look at their latest consolidated earnings report, on 11.9B of sales, 2.4B is spent on sales and marketing. That's 20%. To say that half of it is on the sales cost, I totally believe it.
You can't compare Apple to the average tech company, their margins are obscene. Most of us don't live in a tech world as glamous as Apple. 5% margin for servers, 3% for PC/laptops.
Not sure what industry you are from, but this is my industry and the world I live in. So I'm really not making those numbers up, :)
