Quote:(a buddy of mine owns an Eagle BPO, he hardly ever used it before the changes because nobody used eagles. ever. nowadays, his BPO is running almost 24/7)
So taking this up as an example for the moment. I'm going to assume the BPO is used/research to "ideal maximums" i.e skills/researched values are all maxed/optimal.
Using
this 2012 sale thread of the Eagle BPO as a reference, the Eagle BPO is worth 110 bil. I can only assume it's gone up in value since then.
Eagle sells for =~ 167 mil.
If you buy all your components off sell orders, cost to manufacture is 145 million.
If you buy all your components using buy orders at current average rates, you're looking at 122 million.
Lets favour the lower manufacture cost to give the Eagle the best profit margin possible.
Eagle, when fully researched, takes =~ 2132 minutes (1 day, 16 hours) to build. There's a big assumption here that this is manufactured in a normal NPC station, *not* a POS. This is not insignificant, but I cbf doing the numbers now, and most people are risk-averse when it comes to a 110b piece of paper.
At the lower manufacture cost, that's almost 20,000 ISK per minute profit from the Eagle BPO. That blows our pithy 500-1500 isk per minute out the water for sure. I won't deny this.
But even at this gloriously high ROI, you're looking at just under 11 years to make back your 110 billion ISK on the blueprint. At the lower profit margin, you're looking at over 20 years.
There's blueprints out there worth 5 million isk which turn a 1000-1500 isk/min profit, which return your initial investment in half a year.
Maybe it's just me, but this makes T2 BPOs absolutely not worth the money. I'd agree that the fact you've crammed 20 times the profit per minute into one job makes it "logistically easier" to deal with, but an efficient logistic chain, an alt account running 30 slots which self-funds through GTC is a far better option. The *only* way you make money off a T2 BPO is if you successfully resale it for equal or more than you paid for it.
This is why people get their knickers in a knot about CCP potentially destroying the value of T2 BPOs by removing/seeding them. Not because their industrial advantage will be lost, but because they'll lose all their investment on what I see as a poor choice for industrial types to go for, buying instead a hyped-up collectors item. Too bad, so sad.