Does that matter except as a philosophical question? The point of a free market in practice is to ensure that sale values are correlated with, and reasonably close to, production costs.

If an ostensibly free market is not producing competition which causes that to happen, it's a problem for society; then, it is society's prerogative to use whatever means appropriate to fix it. That could include, depending on the ideology of the society, loans and grants for new participants in the market, legislation that regulates pricing, specific taxation policies, or even rejecting the free market entirely and moving to central control.

By analogy, a mysterious violent crime case might need to be solved for justice to be attained, but it doesn't need to be solved in order for a society to improve and make itself safer generally.