Often times they’re technically separate entities. In that case, they can actually get in trouble for selling it cheaper internally as an anti-competitive practice.
Big companies tend to either have separated legal entities or to run each department with their own budget/business goals, which lead to absurdities like having contract to get an engineer from another department as an independent reviewer or long discussion between director-level executive when R&D tells logistic that instead of throwing an expensive but useless part away, R&D can take it for the lab(I’ve seen it, not sure that the money saved on the part was cheaper than the director grade meeting needed to make it happen)
How does that work when a company can’t buy from itself?
Often times they’re technically separate entities. In that case, they can actually get in trouble for selling it cheaper internally as an anti-competitive practice.
Big companies tend to either have separated legal entities or to run each department with their own budget/business goals, which lead to absurdities like having contract to get an engineer from another department as an independent reviewer or long discussion between director-level executive when R&D tells logistic that instead of throwing an expensive but useless part away, R&D can take it for the lab(I’ve seen it, not sure that the money saved on the part was cheaper than the director grade meeting needed to make it happen)