From June 2008 oil was at a high of $144.78 per barrel. During the period from April 2011 until July of 2014, the price of oil hovered between about $115.32 per barrel and about $105.22 a barrel. Then, starting in August 2014 oil began a precipitous fall in price from the $105.22 to $33.62 a barrel in January 2016. Although the U. S. has great amounts of oil that can be brought out of the ground by “fracking,” by the beginning of 2016 many of the workers in the U. S. oil exploration and drilling industry were out of work and tremendous amounts of oil exploration equipment was sitting in the equivalent of “used car lots” to be sold.

Owns a machine that can produce two specialized products. production time for product tlx is two units per hour and for product mtv is four units per hour. the machine’s capacity is 2,100 hours per year. both products are sold to a single customer who has agreed to buy all of the company’s output up to a maximum of 3,570 units of product tlx and 1,610 units of product mtv. selling prices and variable costs per unit to produce the products follow. product tlx product mtv selling price per unit $ 11.50 $ 6.90 variable costs per unit 3.45 4.14 determine the company's most profitable sales mix and the contribution margin that results from that sales mix.