How do they make any money????

I imagine there is someone fully automated making 10's of thousands a day for not much more than the material cost, which wont be much considering their size and weight. You can get packs of 30 from poundland starting at watch battery size.

The crap ones you buy off eBay won't last a day and even the bran names ones on there are usually fakes sometimes you're better off paying the £1.50

The Chinese Govt subsidises postage so making it easier for so much cheaply made stuff arriving in the west in huge numbers.

Paid a fiver for a Swiss battery told it should last two years we shall see

Others are selling for £1.70 so they've already had you for an easy 29p

I once met a guy at a party who was saying 'How can people make proffit off 1.5 Euro per kilo oranges. We should boycott such producers'. I told the idiot i just came back from a country where i bought oranges for two cents per piece(though direct from the garden). The one seling you this might still be laughing at you for overpaying

You don't need to ebay cheap batteries, you can get strips of them from Poundland and shops like that.
I've bought them but end up using the common type like CR2025 and have little ones I never use left over.

There is one caveat: While you can buy batteries that are the same size and voltage and work they may not last so long, and if they are the cheaper technology may be more likely to leak if you leave them in, like an unused watch in a drawer. So like Lithium / Silver Oxide >>> Alkaline.

I see yours are alkaline, what the old ones? Poundlands strips are also alkaline:
http://www.poundland.co.uk/leisure-and-entertainment/batteries/fusionmax-button-cell-30-pack
But these are the good ones:
http://www.poundland.co.uk/leisure-and-entertainment/batteries/fusionmax-lithium-cell-8-pack
So, what I'm saying is they may look the same and work but the cheapers ones may not be so good.

You can actually get Lithium 1.5v AAs these days, they are far more expensive but last much longer, handy for things like equipment that's hard to reach that you want to just leave for a couple years.

Pounland knows the score .. i regularly buy 8 Cathedral City Mature Cheddar slices .. sadly you cannot sell foods on ebay!

I've never been in a "Poundland" shop and don't know where there is one!

Hardly ever go shopping these days, so buy most stuff (including groceries) on line.

These batteries didn't come from China, as they arrived in two days.

Ok, maybe the seller bought from China but, however you look at it, 0.0398p each including p&p, is ridiculously cheap!

It does occur that, perhaps, we have been 'brain washed' into accepting retail costs that are far away from manufactured cost!

Back to these batteries....why would any, unscrupulous, manufacturer turn out substandard ones?
It surely can't be any more difficult, or financially advantageous, to make an industry standard comparable product!

I will report back, in the fullness of eventually.

What I have seen is "6047 sold"....or at least stated so!

Possibilities include:
a) dumping (in the economic sense that Trump complained about)
b) dumping in the retail sense of excess batteries no-one else would buy
c) substandard batteriesfrom normal manufacture weeded out by quality control but illicitly sold back

I usually buy 10 AA Sony batteries from Pounland also £1 to use with my wireless keyboard & mouse , they're ok usually last a few weeks but glad i don't pay any more , you still see people buying a pack of 8 'Super Strong' Duracell in asda for like £5.99 but i know which deal i prefer

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/watch-battery-3V_1307521179.html?spm=a2700.7724857.main07.46.2bd13975LshCS8&s=p

Chinese Manufacturer selling them for $0.01 a piece with minimum order of 5000. Even after shipping and tariffs EU Buyers are only paying about a penny each as I see it.

One reason those prices are so low is that paying VAT seems to be completely voluntary for Chinese exporters to the UK. They understate the value of containers at the docks, then spirit the contents into warehouses registered to phoney UK front companies. Hey presto, flog the sh1te on Amazon or eBay, and no VAT to pay, because Amazon and eBay claim it's not their responsibility to check for VAT.

In the long term this suits Amazon and eBay, because in the end they'll be the only places you can buy anything at all. And the Chinese tat won't be a penny a piece then.

The government knows this is going on, because the VATman keeps telling them so, but it seems to be official policy to put genuine home-grown suppliers out of business via these tax-evading products made from sub-standard materials, using stolen designs and cheap labour.

Rechargeable batteries collapsed the market for disposable batteries. It's been several years since I bought any batteries, but a few years before that I seemed to buy them all the time.

Chinese battery makers have their plant as a sunk cost, and can produce batteries for the cost of materials and labour, which won't be much. Some of them could well be so called 'zombie' companies, running at a loss, but kept alive by banks, so they don't have to show their bad loans.