don't get me wrong, i love their fans... but come on, it's a fan.
those exec and investors are dreaming if you think that market is that large.
Its not just fans, they also make pretty good heatsinks. A lot of those heatsinks are pure copper. So Zalman must get through quite a lot of the stuff and it isn't cheap.
For example, I used to have a dual CPU machine with two large Zalman pure copper heatsinks, the sort that are really big and have fins in a fan-out arrangement. In total there was about half a kilo of copper hanging off of that motherboard. They didn't even need fans on them, just the case fan was enough.
Manufacturing this shit must involve having a lot of copper stock.