Weeks 11/12/13: The Holidays Are Here!

So it's been three weeks. Kinda crazy but I've been able to keep things going fairly well.

Prices have been pushing up pretty heavily. All of my inputs have increased in price by 10-15% while my output has actually increased in price by nearly 20%, padding my individual profit margins nicely. It's been a rollercoaster set of weeks as my timing has been rough on getting orders placed and filled, but altogether quite profitable.

Week	Inflow	Outflow	Actual Net	Expected Net
0	0	-77,836,602	-77,836,602	-77,836,602
1	29,389,995	-21,983,814	7,406,180	8,000,000
2	24,600,000	-39,243,550	-14,643,550	10,000,000
3	33,129,974	-5,490,829	27,639,145	45,000,000
4	0	-1,499,400	-1,499,400	15,000,000
5	0	0	0	15,000,000
6	12,800,000	-17,927,889	-5,127,889	15,000,000
7	22,047,585	-50,759,711	-28,712,126	5,000,000
8	44,800,000	-32,860,026	11,939,974	5,000,000
9	44,800,000	-23,220,983	21,579,018	15,000,000
10	54,463,000	-90,676,579	-36,213,579	15,000,000
11	25,859,976	-23,612,163	2,247,813	16,000,000
12	112,205,002	-20,458,330	91,746,671	16,000,000
13	42,498,750	-98,839,034	-56,340,284	16,000,000
14	48,000,000	-32,000,000	XXX	16,000,000
15	48,000,000	-32,000,000	XXX	16,000,000
TOTAL	447,581,891	-504,391,361	-56,809,470	XXX

Altogether, a solid three week period. Total net profit of almost 38M with very heavy variable cost investments in my latest week. Thanks for visiting!

Industry Profitability

I've prompted myself to do this detailed profitability analysis since I've recently reached a skill milestone that will impact a variety of my underlying costs. In determining whether the skill books are worth the cost (some of them are quite expensive), I wanted to figure out where my break-even value for each book would be, split into various components.

I've separated my transactions into a variety of smaller codes but have decided to summarize them into three categories: per unit costs, per unit tax costs, and per unit revenues.

The per unit costs are the raw material purchase prices that I pay on the market, including any brokerage fees for placing orders or additional costs imposed by a contract. For example, placing a contract with a supplier is a fixed brokerage cost of 10,000 ISK. If that's for one unit, that's a hefty cost but at my current volume my typical brokerage is around 100K (just short of 1% of my orders).

The per unit tax costs are those taxes imposed on various aspects that do not include the direct buying or selling of products. For my planetary interaction goods, these are import and export costs.

The per unit revenue is my average revenue per unit over the current life of my project. This figure includes transaction and brokerage taxes.

Info	Revenue	Variable Cost	Taxes	Profit
Total	255,587,051	166,338,225	73,029,600	16,219,226
Per Unit	1,234,720	804,014	352,800	77,906

My return on each unit is only 6.7%, which is quite disappointing. I significantly underestimated the level of taxes that I would face in this business. There is not much room for me to reduce my individual variable costs; however, there are some avenues to reducing my tax costs that I am actively pursuing. I believe that by the end of this week I'll be able to get some quick improvements that will raise my profit per unit to around $100K each, which would improve my return to 8.6%. At 6.7%, I would be better off not buying the individual inputs and selling the intermediate inputs that I'm creating myself. I need to reach 12% for my industry to be profitable in the "cost of capital" sense. I believe that point is reachable in the long run; however, I'll need to do further analysis in the near-term to see if I shouldn't seriously consider liquidating or stopping production until my cost-cutting measures are fully implemented.

Week 10: Spreadsheet Shenanigans

Well, I messed my spreadsheet up this week. I decided that I wanted to clean up some of my information and made a stupid mistake that messed up my data history after having corrected for an error in my history. So, my table has changed slightly for every week since week 7 but I've gotten it as close as I can with the effort I'm willing to expend.

With that said, Thanksgiving weekend was kind to my sales. I found prices quite favorable and invested a very very heavy amount into my components totaling 90M worth of purchases. Additionally, I pushed over 50M of sales for the first time to-date. What's greater about this week is that I have been completely unable to produce any outputs since Saturday, yet I still managed 50M in sales, which is another reason why I'm investing so much cash into inputs.

Week	Inflow	Outflow	Actual Net	Expected Net
0	0	-77,836,602	-77,836,602	-77,836,602
1	29,389,995	-21,983,814	7,406,180	8,000,000
2	24,600,000	-39,243,550	-14,643,550	10,000,000
3	33,129,974	-5,490,829	27,639,145	45,000,000
4	0	-1,499,400	-1,499,400	15,000,000
5	0	0	0	15,000,000
6	12,800,000	-17,927,889	-5,127,889	15,000,000
7	22,047,585	-50,759,711	-28,712,126	5,000,000
8	44,800,000	-32,860,026	11,939,974	5,000,000
9	44,800,000	-23,220,983	21,579,018	15,000,000
10	54,463,000	-90,676,579	-36,213,579	15,000,000
11	50,000,000	-34,000,000	XXX	16,000,000
12	50,000,000	-34,000,000	XXX	16,000,000
TOTAL	266,030,553	-361,499,384	-95,468,831	XXX

So, my net has gone down again. Part of this is due to a revision in weeks 6/7 where I had messed up an input while a good chunk is due to my heavy investment in inputs this week. Let's hope that next week is as positive as this week. Next week will also include the unit profitability analysis as well as where my break-even point is on my fixed investments.

Market Salvaging: Introduction

My posts to this point have focused on my manufacturing business where I'm purchasing a wide variety of inputs to create a more advanced output. Over the last two months I've been slowly building up the appropriate skills and inventory to begin earning profits on what I'll term "Market Salvaging".

The idea behind this project is to identify goods that generally sell below the reprocessing threshhold for a given good. In Eve, every item can be broken down into its components at a base rate of 50% of the good's initial values minus a tax and plus some additional reprocessing skills. So, if Good A can be constructed with 100 tritanium then it can be broken down for 100 * (50% * ( 1 - TaxRate) * (1 + Skills)) tritanium.

In a well-functioning market, one would expect the price of a good to match the price of its inputs plus capital costs. In Eve, this is true for goods where the market is made up of 100% constructed goods. Ships and a large majority of the tier-1 constructed items are sold right around that price point. But there are many goods that are not player-made and are dropped following combat. For example 50mm Reinforced Nanofiber Plates I are not constructed but are dropped in this fashion. Additionally, these fittings are in low demand because they are not particularly useful and are a fairly common item. Finally, this item reprocesses into a few thousand units of a variety of materials as opposed to some items that might only reprocess into a hundred or so materials. This particular item tends to sell at a very profitable level for reprocessing and provides for a good example of the types of goods that I want to target.

The good needs to be in significantly higher supply than in demand. The supply of the good needs to be from NPC combat. The good needs to have a fairly significant amount of reprocess-able materials.

Now that I have a set of guidelines, I need to find my break-even price for each good. My approach has been to create a spreadsheet of identified goods that follow those three rules, what they reprocess into, and formulate the break-even price based upon my skills, tax rate, and market rate for the reprocessed materials. For most of my purchases, I'm looking at a 10-15% profitability per unit. There can be significant lag between when I place an order for purchase and when it is fulfilled. Since these are NPC-drops, I'm getting one to two sold to me at a time. I also work to maintain the highest offer on the market to maximize the speed at which I acquire my goods.

Approximately 10 weeks ago I placed $50 million in orders. Due to the slow up-take, I have seen about 60% of my orders fulfilled over that time. As my orders are fulfilled I replace them with new orders. I'm the only player in the market for one of these goods which has provided me with a slow but steady stream of income. And so, with that, here is my revenue information over the lifetime of this project.

Week	Inflow	Outflow	Net
0	0	-50,905,119	-50,905,119
10	35,376,045	-30,849,676	4,526,370
TOTAL	35,376,045	-81,754,795	-46,378,750

No projections or expectations for this business as it's simply a way for me to have my ISK at-work. This business is arguably running a profit at all-times as my costs can always immediately be recouped either through the reprocessing (if I've made the sale) or by simply cutting out my order. Unlike the manufacturing business, the products I'm purchasing there cannot be turned into an immediate profit through reprocessing so to wind that business down requires making profitable sales. I plan to use profits from the manufacturing business to continue expanding this business. Right now, my orders only cover three goods and I've identified dozens that qualify for this approach. Long-term, I hope for this business to carry an open escrow account of around 300M that produces around 30M per week in revenue at a profitability rate of between 5 and 10%.

Week 9: Steady As She Goes

No major changes this week aside from keeping my low-level production at full capacity which meant semi-solid production at my final production site.
My costs were down a touch this week. I need to figure out what goods I'm short on and place some orders so I'll probably have higher costs next week, but I've got a solid supply of all but one of my inputs -- which I do have a pair of outstanding contracts for.
I'm being a little aggressive with my "inflow" value this week. I anticipate my products selling today, but they are technically still an account receivable and I usually don't include them in the table until they've sold. If they don't sell until tomorrow I'll adjust the table to reflect that so that my inflows are appropriate. I am fairly low on liquidity as a result (75% of my inflow is a receivable right now). But, with that said, if they do sell by today then I'll have matched last week's sales which is a nice steady step towards complete profitability.

Week	Inflow	Outflow	Actual Net	Expected Net
0	0	-77,836,602	-77,836,602	-77,836,602
1	29,389,995	-21,983,814	7,406,180	8,000,000
2	24,600,000	-39,243,550	-14,643,550	10,000,000
3	33,129,974	-5,490,829	27,639,145	45,000,000
4	0	-1,499,400	-1,499,400	15,000,000
5	0	0	0	15,000,000
6	12,800,000	-16,000,000	-3,200,000	15,000,000
7	22,047,585	-50,448,311	-28,400,726	5,000,000
8	44,800,000	-28,133,226	16,666,774	5,000,000
9*	44,800,000	-23,220,983	21,579,018	15,000,000
10	45,000,000	-30,000,000	XXX	15,000,000
11	45,000,000	-30,000,000	XXX	15,000,000
TOTAL	211,567,553	-265,784,605	-54,217,051	XXX

If I keep going at this rate, week 12 will be my official profitability point. And really, that's actually a poor analysis as my costs for the current week are generally for production in the following week. For example, of the 20M that I spent this week, only about 8M of that has actually gone into production, the rest of it is sitting in a queue to be produced for next week's sales - so my cashflows don't line up for an appropriate profit analysis.
I'm keeping fairly detailed data so perhaps at week 12 I'll do a full profitability analysis and break down my marginal costs, revenues, and profits to see what kind of return I'm earning on my inputs.

Week 11 will bring a new component as I will have completed a skill tree that will bring my secondary revenue center on-line. That means a whole new table and it's own cost and revenue tracking.

Week 7/8: Investment and Expansion

This week's big news is expansion onto a new production support line.
If you look at the first 6 weeks you might ask, "Why the hell would you expand? You're 64 million in the red!" Well, beyond my start-up costs, as of the end of week 6 I was up a net of 13M and many of my fixed assets were sitting idle far too much. Even after my expansion into another production support line, I still have a production up-time of only around 20%.
My expansion cost me about $10M in fixed investments while I pushed another $30M into inputs. I continue to face supply challenges with just a handful of inputs that keep my production lines held-up but my efficiency is improving just a little bit with every passing day. I have about $36M of sales goods awaiting purchase with another $12M of goods in active production. If I cashed out entirely today, I could nearly break-even on my total investment. But that's not the point of an investment, is it?

Week	Inflow	Outflow	Actual Net	Expected Net
0	0	-77,836,602	-77,836,602	-77,836,602
1	29,389,995	-21,983,814	7,406,180	8,000,000
2	24,600,000	-39,243,550	-14,643,550	10,000,000
3	33,129,974	-5,490,829	27,639,145	45,000,000
4	0	-1,499,400	-1,499,400	15,000,000
5	0	0	0	15,000,000
6	12,800,000	-16,000,000	-3,200,000	15,000,000
7	22,047,585	-50,448,311	-28,400,726	5,000,000
8	44,800,000	-28,133,226	16,666,774	5,000,000
9	45,000,000	-30,000,000	XXX	15,000,000
10	45,000,000	-30,000,000	XXX	15,000,000
TOTAL	166,767,553	-242,563,622	-75,796,069	XXX

My net cash flow over these two weeks is negative yet again. I had to liquidate some mineral assets that I've been holding onto for cases such as this; however, as week 8 clearly shows, I significantly improved my production capabilities. This extra capital allowed me to expand and purchase some missing inputs.
Included in the week 7 costs is my first inter-corporation trade, of rather significant savings for me. Cutting out transaction and broker fees, I saved nearly $400,000 in taxes alone while agreeing to pay my corp-mate a price that would likely have taken a number of days, if not a week or more, on the market to fulfill. This time savings is largely the reason why I'm sitting on a large stockpile of receivables and have had good production up-time. He seems to have a pretty strong supply-chain for some goods that I've had trouble supplying in a timely manner so I think this will improve my time-to-market considerably.

Weeks 4/5/6: Life.

Whew, it's been a crazy pair of weeks. Production all but halted during this time and I made absolutely no sales, but I did finish a rather important skill to significantly improve production speed.
While I'm not entirely back -- travel plans next week plus another round of everyone's favorite financial competition ModelOff on Saturday -- I should atleast get my production moving again. I've been able to put about 2/3rds of the product I did generate over this time up for sale; however, I also placed some rather large orders for my inputs to keep my capital active. With about 15M in new orders placed and some upgrades to my production chain, I'm hoping to be able to really kickstart things when my schedule calms down in a few weeks.

Week	Inflow	Outflow	Actual Net	Expected Net
0	0	-77,836,602	-77,836,602	-77,836,602
1	29,389,995	-21,983,814	7,406,180	8,000,000
2	24,600,000	-39,243,550	-14,643,550	10,000,000
3	33,129,974	-5,490,829	27,639,145	45,000,000
4	0	-1,499,400	-1,499,400	15,000,000
5	0	0	0	15,000,000
6	12,800,000	-16,000,000	-3,200,000	15,000,000
7	15,000,000	-10,000,000	XXX	5,000,000
8	15,000,000	-10,000,000	XXX	5,000,000
TOTAL	99,919,969	-163,982,085	-64.062,117	XXX

While the net cashflow over the last 3 weeks is negative, I am sitting on a really unbalanced stockpile of inventory. My newly placed orders don't do much to correct for that issue; however, my skill upgrade should allow me to start catching up on one of the backlogs. My main goal over the next two weeks is to keep a relatively steady level of production and shoot for a gross sales amount of about 15M per week for a fairly modest revenue stream. I'm including relatively high costs as I hope to take an hour one day and set up an additional resource input line to take advantage of my skill upgrades and balance my inventory. If I can do that, then weeks 9 and 10 should have a very favorable outlook.
I also need to follow up with my corp mates to see how their production lines are coming along. If they are nearing production level, I'll definitely have to step my game up a notch to take advantage of the new supply in a timely manner.

Week 3: Forward Movement

This week went much better than last week; however, I failed to keep my production up to my desired standards. Due to work and various other things, I was barely able to keep production moving at a snails pace and completely failed to get a significant chunk of product to market after prices did manage to rebound.

All in all, a profitable week that I hope to expand on for next week, but we'll see how that goes as time continues to be precious.

Week	Inflow	Outflow	Actual Net	Expected Net
0	0	-77,836,602	-77,836,602	-77,836,602
1	29,389,995	-21,983,814	7,406,180	8,000,000
2	24,600,000	-39,243,550	-14,643,550	10,000,000
3	33,129,974	-5,490,829	27,639,145	45,000,000
4	45,000,000	-30,000,000	XXX	15,000,000
5	45,000,000	-30,000,000	XXX	15,000,000
TOTAL	87,119,969	-144,554,796	-57.434,827	XXX

I'm sitting on about $10M in sales inventory with another $25M in production ready to go for this week. Some corp members have begun moving into PI so my costs will turn into profits for them which is exciting. I hate seeing my hard-earned ISK vanish off into the market abyss. Hopefully the additional benefit will be improved supply stability for me so that I can push production up. My current production 'cap' is 100.8M worth of product/week but, as you can see in my forward estimates, I'm not even anticipating on hitting 50% of that. With just a few fixed cost additions, I can easily push that to 201.6M/week too. But there's no point in doing that if I don't have the supply to make it work.

Week 2: Bump-In-The-Road

Things got off to a good start last week, having a higher level of production than I anticipated with a higher sales price than projected. Of course, such good luck had to be followed by bad luck. The market price on my good has dropped significantly due to a seeming influx of product from someone willing to sell almost 20% below the average sales price from the last year. Thankfully, this seller has sold their entire supply so hopefully the price will pick back up. But until then, I'm sitting on $30M of product.
Of course, my inventory is awkward at the moment as I have an oversupply of about half of my goods, the right supply for about 1/3rd of my goods, and an under supply for the remainder.

Week	Inflow	Outflow	Actual Net	Expected Net
0	0	-77,836,602	-77,836,602	-77,836,602
1	29,389,995	-21,983,814	7,406,180	8,000,000
2	24,600,000	-39,243,550	-14,643,550	10,000,000
3	105,000,000	-60,000,000	XXX	45,000,000
4	75,000,000	-60,000,000	XXX	15,000,000
TOTAL	53,989,995	-139,063,967	-85.073,972	XXX

I'm expecting prices to recover this week and for my backlogged inventory to sell at my profitable price level. If not, I have enough liquidity to continue funding production and building inventory. My operation is still not large enough to have a significant impact on prices. My projections wouldn't be so far off if sales had happened. My inflows this week would have been ~55M for a net gain of +15M. We'll see how next week breaks.

Week 1: First Sales

I've just posted my projections for this week and logged on to find that my first set of units has already sold at a marginally higher price than I had initially priced out and I've got another small set up for sale. I've got a larger amount of ISK sitting in escrow than I'd prefer at around 30M. I set a number of my requests at a low point in the price cycle for my inputs and am sitting on quite a few orders hoping for the prices to drop back down to that level. As a result, I've spent quite a bit on purchasing goods at the current price to maintain day-to-day operations. Even so, I've sold a larger number of products in the first week than I anticipated at a higher-than-expected price bringing my inflow up enough so as to come out in the black in the first week.
Of course, my inventory is awkward at the moment as I have an oversupply of about half of my goods, the right supply for about 1/3rd of my goods, and an under supply for the remainder.

Info	Week	Inflow	Outflow	Net
Actual	0	0	-77,836,602	-77,836,602
Actual	1	29,389,995	-21,983,814	7,406,180
Projected	2	50,000,000	-40,000,000	10,000,000
Projected	3	75,000,000	-60,000,000	15,000,000

I vastly under-rated the speed that my production would get going, producing double the outputs in the first week than anticipated. I also vastly underestimated the speed at which I would need to replace my production supply. Due to these, I have accelerated my anticipated sales and cost growth rather significantly, resulting in a slightly less optimistic net profit projection than before. Prices on a couple of my under-supplied inputs are trending upwards rather significantly and I'm hoping to get some corporation partners to produce them and sell them to me at a price in-between the current purchase and sales offers. Such a deal would provide me with a marginally higher profit of as much as 1% per unit.

With my next post I'll be extending the table somewhat to compare actual performance against expected performance. In the meantime, you'll have to do the comparison yourself if you're interested in that kind of thing.

Week 0: Investment and Projections

As I've only started this process this week, I've got nothing but sunk costs, inventory, and projections to show for it.
I've got variable projected costs of about 48,000,000 per batch and a target of getting my first batch produced within a week.

Info	Week	Inflow	Outflow	Net
Actual	0	0	-77,836,602	-77,836,602
Projected	1	14,400,000	-2,376,000	12,024,000
Projected	2	28,800,000	-4,752,000	24,048,000

This is still a new venture so I'm not projecting very far. I've got a very heavy initial burden where I've placed purchase orders for enough materials to produce ~10 days worth of production. Of my investment, ~15,000,000 is for fixed cost structures and goods. Each unit of production costs approximately $1,000,000 on average, which indicates that my first full production completion should nearly pay off my fixed investments; however, I don't expect to complete production on this first set until week 3 or 4, depending on how smoothly things go. I hope to sell 12 units in the first week and 24 units in the second week, which is the basis for these calculations.

Note: Due to time constraints, this post is actually about 4 days late.. Hopefully I'll get better at this with time.

Eve + Economics

So, as a big fan of economics and market analysis and all of that stuff, I have begun playing a little game called Eve Online.

It's a space sandbox where effectively everything used within the game is managed and controlled by the players. As such, it has a vibrant and busy marketplace where many goods trade very quickly and where market efficiency can be quickly analyzed and reviewed for investment opportunities.

I've been scouting out the landscape for almost a month now, gathering information, materials, and creating plans. Additionally, I've put together a small sum of capital from which I intend to start my empire.

I've scraped together starting capital of ~120M ISK (the currency), about 20M of which is wrapped up in various equipment with the other 100M being hard cash.

From this 100M, I'm going to begin tracking the ever-moving value of the commodities that I purchase and sell using this opportunity and evaluating myself against the market.

I'll be approaching this from two main components:

1) Item Creation

I've identified some goods that I believe are significantly over-priced relative to the inputs. For these goods, I am investing a sum of ~60M ISK in creating a production pipeline that I expect to earn a return of nearly 10% per week. This market is large enough that my initial splash should not impact prices; however, I do anticipate that my return will decline significantly once I am more established and making up a more significant portion of the market.

2) Item Destruction

I've identified some goods that I believe are significantly under-priced relative to their inputs. Eve has a reprocessing mechanic that allows a player to break an item down into its components at a loss of between 45% and 60% of the items inputs. I did not anticipate to find items that were selling below 50% of their raw production cost (based on market prices). As this business will rely largely on volume, it will be phase two of my approach once I've got a strong level of initial capital.

I'll provide weekly updates on my cash flow and any adjustments to future cashflow expectations to help evaluate how the business is going.

Hopefully you'll find this as interesting as I do!.