I’ve been making P2 for awhile, selling it to my corp at full est value. It’s a good cashflow.
I decided to try making P3 so I setup a planet to make Cryoprotectant Solution.
The ingredients are 10x each Fertilizer, Test Cultures, and Synthetic Oil (all of which I can manufacture). That will produce 3 units of Cryo per cycle.
I noticed the total value of all three ingredients is 376,500 isk (i.e. presuming I sell the ingredients instead of using them for P3) (before sales tax and fees).
The value of 3 units of Cryo is 473,400.
(all based on Jita best Buyer price)
That would be a profit on the Cryo over the ingredients of 96,900 isk or about 25%.
While 25% isn’t a shabby profit, it also really isn’t a killing in the market.
So how is it that P3 is considered sooooooooooooo much more porfitable over P2?
I would estimate that most people take the hauling effort into account and P3 should be a lot better value/m³ that you have to bring to the market hubs. Not everyone sells directly to his corp in the PI system.
Cryoprotectant Solution is actually useful in Industry via Blueprints. It is used in every BPC of low, mid, and high grade fancy implant sets. In addition to making next tier PI. That drives up demand for it.
Fertilizer, Test Cultures, and Synthetic Oil are almost* never used in blueprint industry. Only to make next tier PI. So not as much to drive demand.
*There might be 1 tiny exception.
(If I remember right, a year or so ago I started producing those implant BPCs and setting up the Cryoprotectant PI chain I think helped eliminate a lot of ISK capital involved, but it was definitely a limiting factor. I stopped producing them because I didn’t want to scale up the PI chain and I didn’t want to buy Cryo off the market with how expensive it is)
If you sell millions of it, yes of course that can be a good profit. What do you expect? That making P3 out of P2 doubles the value? Did you know that most real life companies make good profits on products that only give them a net profit of a few dollars or even cents per unit?
But it’s also a truism (or falsism depending on your POV) the saying “I’ll loose money on each unit but make it up in bulk”. No, all you do is loose money in bulk.
I mean one guy already answered it, you are not only making 25% more it is way easier to haul that ■■■■ to Jita and sell it. If you would rather do the easier thing and sell the p2 to your corp then do that, 25% margins are actually a lot in this game.
What you’re asking is if 125 is more than 100, which of course it is. It’s 25% more. Additional profit is just that, additional profit. What you should be asking is whether or not it’s worth the extra manufacturing setup, and to that, the only real response is for you to crunch the numbers. Can you make enough P3 with the facilities required to outweigh the loss of P2 you could be making using those Command Center resources?
The other thing no one talked about specifically is time. The volume of the P3 is smaller, but if you’re selling to corp and not hauling, then its just a simple matter of what you can make more of using the limited number of CPU/PG you can access. However, if you’re going to haul it to Jita yourself, the volume the products take up will largely affect the time needed to move it. PI, as we all know, is a very passive income stream. The income you can gain while waiting for production can be greatly reduced if you’re spending more time moving PI commodities than necessary. You can spend hours moving products when you could spend minutes moving smaller volume products and spend the rest of the time ratting, exploring, etc.
PI seems very simple on the surface, but calculating a big profit, you must take into account what you’re doing with the time that you’re not in PI Clicker.
