I get the impression that employees of KNC buy miners to mine themselves, but KNC isn't a mining company like Asicminer.
The difference between owners/employees of KnC buying miners at cost and mining personally or KnC mining as a company isn't really relevant to us as customers. We have no idea how many units they'll use personally and we don't know how much of a hashrate they are targeting. To me the most relevant differences I see between AM mining and KnC mining is that AM is publicly traded and we know what AM's goals for network hashrate are.