Souris Blanche
The Baker Street Irregulars
0
   |
Posted - 2011.09.13 05:15:00 -
[1] - Quote
RAW23 wrote:Non-universally available activities
1)A small T2 invention/production or T3 RE/production operation (smaller than the T1 alternative because of the additional steps involved in the production process).
Capital absorption and returns: God, the pain! There are so many possible permutations here that I don't even know where to begin. Any suggestions?
Obviously, depending on which T2 item(s) you choose to produce each month will determine the amount of capital absorption and the return percentage. Not all T2 items require the same construction materials, not all T2 items have the same Invention time, and not all T2 items can be manufactured in the same amount of time. In fact, some T2 items are not even profitable unless you utilize buy orders to procure construction materials and use sell orders to sell the final products.
That having been said, I am a T2 Producer, so I can speak with confidence when I say that there are products out there that can be produced by an alt (or two) can result in a fairly nice profit margin. For example, using 3 toons, a medium POS, and 10 T1 BPOs, I can easily turn 2.515 billion ISK into 4.375 billion ISK (or more) every 27 days, which is approximately 81% profit margin. The 2.515 billion ISK figure already includes the cost to fuel the POS and the cost of the Datacores needed for the Invention step. I do not waste time mining ICE and doing PI to create my own POS fuel, but rather just send a mail to Lady Patricia and she brings me 28 days of POS fuel whenever I need for approximately 165 million ISK. I log my T2 production alts to queue up a batch of production jobs twice per day, so the amount of 'time spent actually doing this is a very small amount of time. In addition, I do not sell via sell orders, and do not produce the R.A.M./Tech1/component items needed for production. I simply buy the exact items needed for production (and the exact quantities), produce a predetermined quantity of the T2 item, and sell to existing buy orders.
As for the size of the operation, it is limited by the number of real life people you have participating. As you are comparing MD Investing with other potential activities, I chose to show an example with 3 toons which is an amount that can easily be operated by a single person. Depending on your level of commitment, you could utilize more or less toons for T2 production and make more or less profit per month. The minimum number of toons needed for a efficient T2 production operation would be two (2) toons in my opinion. You could technically use only one toon, but whenever your toon was doing invention jobs, then he/she could not be doing copy jobs, and hence it would not be a EFFICIENT T2 production operation. Using two toons allows a player to constantly have up to 11 copy jobs and 11 invention jobs, in addition to up to 22 Manufacturing jobs running at all times. You could also choose to utilize more then 3 toons, but you will eventually run into the problem of not having any more available copy/invention slots (which can be remedied by adding more POS's) and/or reach a saturation point where one person is not be able to log on, queue up jobs, and log off fast enough that additional toons would increase the amount of profit per month. From personal experience, about the highest number of toons I (one person) could use before reaching the saturation point would be about 5-6 toons. Using 5 toons, you could easily turn 4.5-7 billion ISK into 8.75-13 billion ISK every 28 days or so provided the market could handle that quantity of the item without getting flooded.
Using 3 toons and rotating between selling in Jita, Ren/Hek, and Amarr, the market can fairly easily absorb the quantity of the T2 item I produce without getting flooded. If I ever feel the market is getting a bit saturated, I can simply switch over to a different T2 item (previously-researched of course) for a month or two and give the market a chance to recover.
I am not going to say that T2 production is better, or worse, than MD Investing. What I will say would be that both T2 production and MD Investing can both be profitable with relatively small amounts of effort each month and that both activities are susceptible to a variety of risks that can result in a loss. In addition, depending on the amount of money you have available to use for investing, doing other activities may make you more or less profit per month when compared to MD investing. For example, using my initial T2 production numbers above, any MD investment (or portfolio of investments) that earn you less than 2 billion ISK in profit per month after subtracting any losses due to scams/failures would be less beneficial than simply doing T2 production yourself. On the flip side, any investment (or portfolio of investments) that earn you more than 2 billion ISK in profit per month would be better than doing T2 production. |