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.
As I see it if they were mining as a company, they would have no incentive to price under roi. If employees buy at same prices as everyone else, they have incentive for bigger roi. Of course transparency is another question.
Edit: side note kind of off topic, but I was just looking at the order list page and it only comes to like $700,000 or about 40 th. I think that only a smallish percentage might be listed there.