Hi guys,
Little back ground. I did PI fairly soon after it began and had an epic setup over five planets, I thought it was cool as ■■■■ setting it all up to work perfectly on time etc. I fairly recently got the bug for it again. With the mind of setting up just for the beauty of the finely tuned machine producing each tier at the exact perfect rate as it was sucked out of the planets surface.
Now to the problem. I looked and realised to manufacture my chosen material I needed to import a tier1 to one of the planets. To do this would cost me more than the materials are worth on export. Can anyone explain to me why the planets have an import charge? I will have to export it at minimum ONCE to get it offworld again.
What’s the point? If I can’t make isk exporting the final I’m not going to import the raw (to later export it - paying the export tax in the process).
the import tax is exactly half of what the export tax would be for the same product.
I don’t think there can be a case where the accumulated import tax can be higher than the export tax of the finished product - even if you import everything - trust me, I have run factory planets for profit for a few years…
It is of course quite possible for the import tax to eat your (obviously quite slim) margin and make the chain unprofitable.
Just tick the import checkbox in the upper right corners of nodes you import and set your poco tax rate (and broker fee for buy orders if any).
Also set export poco tax rate and sales tax plus broker fee for sell orders (if any) for the final product.
Tax is based per POCO, if its a player POCO and your not in their corp/alliance you may have to pay alot more. If you want to do PI and it be cost effective join a corp with their own POCOs, also its best outside of empire space, PI in a WH for instance is cheaper in terma of tax.
I’m guessing you are extracting materials in high sec? If you are in a corp and null sec alliance with access to very low tax POCO no matter what you produce as long as is P2 or P3 then you can make a lot of money selling them in Amarr or JIta. If you are in high sec then my advice, go join null sec corp.
To avoid Import Tax either do extraction and factories all on the same planet with a single export or … find a system in non HS (can be LS, Null or WH) space check tax on poco’s then do your math’s. Imho if your not extracting then any crappy LS planet with low tax will do. I only do P3 to P4 so found a nice system with very low tax and I import and export once only.