You are literally saying the exact opposite of what actually happened...
I was actually here and an investor during all of that. I know exactly what happened.
AM made a massive profit back in the days when they were the first and only people with working asics. at one point they had around 20% of the network hashrate.
AM had more than 20% of the network (at one point, they made BTCGuild go over 51% for a short amount of time), and at that point, it was hard to deploy more, because the network wasn't growing fast enough. And shortly thereafter, they started selling hardware.
They paid the highest dividends EVER on hardware sales, not mining income. Mining made up the majority of the dividend back then, but that changed very quickly, until now, the majority is hardware sales.
So you think that AM can make more money from selling hardware than mining? If they had and held 20% they would be making 1/5th of 7200 so 1440 btc per day. Lets assume AM is making cubes for dirt cheap and somehow has profits of up to 50% per cube (which is unlikely) then he would need to sell 1440 cubes per day or 50th/s per day.
One of the biggest complaints people have about AM hardware is that it never meets ROI, or takes ridiculously long to do so... That automatically makes it more profitable to sell it than to mine with it.
Your whole "if they had 20% of the network" is irrelevant, because they don't have the hardware to maintain 20% of the network, nor the datacenter to house it.
Not only do I think they can make more money from hardware, their financial records prove it.
Profit margins on those cubes are likely 60% or better. Their cost is likely less than $2/GH to produce them.
FC started selling hardware the second BFL began shipping because the asic monopoly was broken.
You're mistaken.
AM was selling hardware long before BFL was shipping in any quantity to be a threat to anyone. Hardware sales were making those big dividends back in May/June, and BFL was BARELY shipping anything then.
BFL did not cause AM to start selling hardware, profits did.