Now if that were the only value of the share then the price would obviosuly drop as dividends were paid. But the ability to produce more batches of the ASICs at minimal cost adds rather a lot more to the long-term value.
Well, it's not clear what minimal cost is. This original 12Th ish batch cost something like 20k BTC + maybe 100k fiat? (depends how you count those debts exactly) in terms of cash and about nine months in term of time (it's not actually online yet, but let's pretend). If indeed those new batches may be produced, they'd hit next spring at the earliest, and further dampen dividends up to that point through their cost. If things move linearly then 120Th costs 10 times what 12Th costs, and so there will be absolutely no dividends for the entire 9 month interval (but more debt accumulated).
I was talking about more batches of the current ASIC not a newly developed next-gen one (which WOULD cost significant cash).
From memory friedcat indicated that the cost of further chips was under $1 each - to that has to be added the PCBs, cooling, power supplies, rack-mounts etc. But the bulk of expenditure to date has been on the actual development of the ASICs not the production of them - and that's a one-off sunk cost (for this design).
That's why you can't compare ASICMINER to other mining companies - as they just can't expand their ASICs for the same low cost ASICMINER can. We don't have enough information to accurately work out the cost/TH for ASICMINER to produce more hardware - but I'd be shocked if it was anything like as high as 25% of what other miners currently have to pay to get BFL/Avalon hash-power. I'd actually be surprised if it was much over 10%. We already know BFL are happy selling their FIRST batch at a 50% discount (in exchange for return of pretty much useless to them FPGAs) - which is the batch in which they need to be making serious inroads into development costs (as price-cutting won't be too far away once the back-log gets cleared). That indicates that production costs are such that they could sell at half the price and make a good profit (if not, then they're majorly screwed as they'll never recover development costs). I can't see component/PCB/assembly costs being higher for ASICMINER in China than for BFL in the US.
And do remember that the next 50 TH of chips are already done - with assembly starting soon.