Market research group iSuppli has taken a peek inside Apple’s iPhone and is estimating the total hardware and manufacturing cost of each 8GB iPhone is roughly $265.83, generating a margin in excess of 55.6 percent from each retail sale. The long awaited iPhone was launched Friday evening in the US. By the end of the weekend it had sold more than half a million units, and is expected to sell around 4.5 million units this year and 30 million phones by 2011, according to iSuppli.

Each iPhone has approximately $15.25 worth of Infineon wireless and power management chips, the figure is about 6.1% of the total cost of the 8GB iPhone. Samsung processors, SDRAM and NAND Flash memory make up the largest portion of the component costs at 30.5%. Both the 4GB and 8GB iPhone use Samsung’s ARM RISC processor for $14.25. Each also has 1 Gbit of Samsung DDR SDRAM at $14.00. The 4GB iPhone uses $24 worth of Samsung NAND flash, while the 8GB uses $48.
Component makers like Infineon and Samsung are perhaps the biggest winners, with a staggering 30.5 percent of the total components costs for the latter, and 6.1 percent for Infineon. The cost estimates, however, are just for the components and do not takes into account other important expenses such as royalties on intellectual property, shipping, and marketing.