I recently quitted a long and glorious journey as a WH PvP pilot. As I am getting old, I want to settle down and make some stuff instead of killing it.
I have 7 characters on 3 accounts. All types of haulers from DST to JF are learned (ships I do not have). I have a perfect trader and a character now close to Loki production in terms of skills. All the characters can do at least 10 reactions.
Also I have smth like 10 billion ISK to start with.
What I want is an advise on where to start. I want to go producing, but I really do not want to mine and do any rattling. I want to buy stuff, haul, research and produce.
At first glance all the items, which can be produced, are sold on a very low margin compared to the cost of resources. So how do you, people, know where the profit lies? And what do you think of the base of operations? Should I think of putting my citadel somewhere in WH or Highsec or public manufacturing places can yield profit?
Sorry for this barrage of newbie questions, but I really need a comprehensive advise. A link towards good reading will also do the trick.
I started making real and stable money after I had invested like 100B in industry. like 200M/day on average (over a month).
Learn what are all the costs. MANY costs are hidden and will make your industry feel like a waste of time - which it will be.
It’s the opposite. I do work where the profit is, and I don’t work unless there is profit. You take your skills, you look at what is worth doing, and you do it.
Don’t use structures for HS. They actually are an added cost, if you include the probability to lose your BPOs or the index cost.
Also they require you to be present all the time. Industry is more the long time run, so you rather not need to be present.
I spent this evening counting in Excel and decided to try one-stage (no reactions for now) production of small T2 Minmatar ships - Hounds, Sabres, Stilettoes. Should I look for station, for player-owned Citadel or put my own Raitaru with needed rigs in WH?
The absolute easiest option is to join a nullbloc. They have JF service, good industrial infrastructure, and buyers for stuff like HACs that you might even be able to sell above Jita for.
But then the transport cost is much higher than in HS (this is one of the costs I said was hidden)
There is not ONE best place.
NS is good for things with high isk-to-volume ratio, because better rig effects and the added cost is in the volumic price.
WS is good (you live in WS, not in a WH. The WH is the structure that allows you to change systems, like a stargate - you live in HS, not in stargate) assuming you have low volume of production and the ability to withdraw ALL your asset fast if people come to attack you - that is, if you want to be a slave to the game.
LS I heard is good for reaction, not sure about it.
HS is good for high volume items (ships typically).
I think they had the right idea up above about going to nullsec. Here’s the thing, how many sabres are getting lost in Hi and Low sec? Basically 0. They get lost constantly in null, along with bombers and fast tackle. Null has the best industry setups and the most demand for the exact ships you want to build. I know my alliance has fully rigged citadels costing hundreds of billions of isk maximized for industrial efficiency that are free to use. Not to mention a steady stream of miners, PI, and gas huffers coming to you. Why would you not do that?
Do you think those sabres are being flown in hi sec? Really? Or do you think they are being moved to null, where the demand actually is? And does eve marketer show contracts or just market sales? Honest question, I don’t know how that program works
There are multiple decisions you need to make before you can get really useful advice:
(1) Are you willing to manage buy/sell orders?
(2) Are you willing to pay/Wait for shipping?
(3) How quickly do you want to “flip” raw materials into sales?
(4) Are you willing to compete with other people on market prices?
(1) The High sec trades hubs have incredibly high traffic. You can buy and sell just about anything incredibly fast. However, due to the traffic, individuals sales don’t make a lot of profit (and much of it sells for less than it costs to build).
(2) Null sec tends to have much better (per item) profit but things move slow… You also need to figure out how to correct for shortages of key resources (such as titanium) .
For example, I am currently the sole major station trader in my region of null sec for a bunch of commonly used items (which I purchase the raw materials for via local null-sec buy orders and then process them). I have no competition so I don’t have to be very active but it can take the full 2-3 months to Flip things.
I am making enough income with a sustained 20-30 billion ISK investment to Plex my account and have money left over for the occasional pvp splurge… I think I spend about 2-3 hours a week managing everything.
I clicked the eve marketer tab and looked at the sellers tab, sorted by region. The Forge certainly has the majority of sales, but I was seeing 26 sales just for the null-sec region of esotaria. Thats more than the amount you implied by 160 - 140 (sold in forge). Perhaps there is a discrepancy in how the data is determined in the two sources?
Edit: I failed to filter eve marketer to within 1 day… my mistake. There were however 25 sales in Stain in the last 15 minutes.
Pulling from the data in December, There is a massive reduction in sales potential for null sec regions (Delve is somewhat of an exception) If you are planning to sell things outside of Jita, adjust your output to account for the lower sales.
For example, Esotaria appears to have around 2 % the volume of JIta. If we apply @Anderson_Geten’s example for Sabres you should be expecting to sell an absolute maximum of 2 of them per day in that region over the same time period.
Edit:
That being said you still need to beat or match the Jita Pricing to make that work. Production material shortages might make that rough. Your potential advantage here is that something is there for the “buy it now” people who don’t wanna wait for shipping. You might also be the only seller. Adjust your prices to exploit this if you want but it might reduce your sales further.
Someone might have said something similar earlier, but the profit in sales often comes more from the purchase of goods not from the actual sale to customers. For example, used car dealers make most of the their profit from buying your trade-in vehicles at major markdowns (new cars are profitable mostly from the interest rate on the loan).
Applying this to eve, unless you want to mine the materials yourself, put the bulk of your research time into the price point for your buy orders. If you do good here, almost anything you make can turn a profit. Null-sec corps often have a buy-back program that revolves around this.
Edit: since you have the skill to fly large cargohold ships, you can use sites like evemarketer to find production materials at unusually low prices (in random obscure locations), saving you the wait time for buy orders.
Eve “isk per hour” is a wonderful program/tool to use as well if you are struggling to determine what to actually make. It can do all the profit calculations for you and even give you a recommended list of what to make based on the market data it download. There might be some issues with it, but its an easy hassle free starting point.
The profit comes from both. Actually from the difference between the two.
If it costs you A to produce an item at hub (include broker fee, manufacturing cost, BPO investment, hauling cost, plex cost to have the manpower), and you sell it to price B (after removal of 10% broker fee and tax) exactly T months after starting to invest in materials (not BPO) , then your margin is ( (B-A)/B )^T . For example, if you take 4 months to sell your item, and you make a 50% margin (correct) , then in practice you have a monthly margin 12.5%
If you have several items, then the average margin is the geometric mean of the sales, that is for each sale (delay, quantity, margin) you make the margin^delayâ‹…quantity and pass the product of all to the totalquantity th root.
if you sell 2 items after a month, with 50% margin, then 3 items the next month, 55% margin, then your item margin is [ 0.5^2 Ă— 0.55^6 ] ^1/5 = 37%
If you still have orders after 90days, then you don’t consider those orders that expire, but still consider the broker fee. So if your initial stack was 100 items and 50 were sold, your broker fees (which are accounted in the value B) should be doubled.
You don’t want to maximize that value, but you want a threshold below which it’s not interesting for you to go on it.
So if you produce a stack of 12 sabres, but it takes 6 months to sell them, your monthly margin is so low that going HS is more interesting.
Which, in practice, is what would happen.
I am not disagreeing with this. My statement explicitly stated “more” not “all”.
When I calculate the profitability for products, I value the items consumed in production for theircurrent market value (edit: originally stated this as net preset value), not at the price point I acquired them. The Sale Profit (for me) is determined by the Net Sales Revenue (minus fees and taxes) - current market value of inputs.
I seperate the two “profits” for myself when doing calculations but I recognize that other people will not go that far (ie isolating trading, hauling and production value gains from each other).
As an example:
Finished product “A” Currently sells for 100 Isk
Production Materials sell (order) for 95 ISK
I Acquired the materials (Buy order) for 85 ISK
If you look at “combined”:
100 / 85 = 17.6% Profit (Ignored taxes to keep this simple)
But if you calculate the profit based on current market value , making the item only netted 5.26% (100/95)
The remaining 12.34% (in asset growth) came from the purchase of raw materials. Seeing that, I would then be incentivised to examine if I was better off re-selling the raw materials instead of using them.
As for your later talk about turnover time:
you are correct in that a quick turnover results in higher Average Net Profit (per time period)
That being said, there is also a subjective cost to your personal time. I would rather spent 10 minutes posting a sell order somewhere remote and waiting (where I am the only seller) than spending hours playing (what used to be) the .01 Isk game.
My personal goal is to achieve the highest rate of:
Net worth gained / Actual Time Spent at the keyboard.
Ive currently got the Capital reserves and market order slots to permit being patient. It works for me but it wont for others.
About a year ago, I cornered the market in Feythabolis for Medium and Large Ship Rigs. I fully stocked the local market with every single version of those sizes of rigs. Things moved really slow (some of the stuff even expired the 90 day timers) but due to the high number of items slots on the market. I had to start 8-10 new items runs in the factory every day I logged in. (god i went through soooo many +2 run decryptors…)
I was essentially compensating for a low turnover rate with high volume of items. I got a large Profit / Time spent ratio at the cost of a larger sustained investment
edit: and this was a region where I had no significant competition so I never felt compelled to update prices after the initial post.
