Riverini’s note: We received word on how TEST Alliance Please Ignore had some issues with money, to the point of asking +100bil loans from a “mystery” donor (Hint: He prolly owns a husky dog).
Rather than pointing and laughing at TEST Alliance financial incompetence (read on and you will find out why), we at Eve News24 embarked in a discovery journey to fix TEST Alliance economy and bring them a bit closer to that impossible dream. For this, we enrolled our very own “Space Clark Howard”; Danny Centauri – who made a damn fine job at pointing the leaks and proposing how to fix them. He warrants an interesting read, even you are not an industrialist.
Fixing TEST Alliance’s Financial Woes – A Case Study.
We have all seen them floating around, but how many of us have actually looked into the TEST accounts beyond cringing at the 32bil per month loss and wondering what poor soul has lent them over 100bil.
With a little bit of digging it becomes pretty apparent that TEST have no reason to be making a 32bil loss per month, infact they could be making a 50bil profit with a little bit of effort perhaps even more with a committed industrial backbone to the alliance.
Before I get into where TEST can see a big gain in income let’s take a look at a couple of small and obvious things that should already be happening within TEST:
1 – Build all T1 BCs in highsec and import them, don’t simply buy in Jita or other Trade Hubs. The profit per unit on BCs varies on where you purchased your minerals, the race and the tier. This averages out for me at around 3.5mil profit per unit when sold in Jita.
If we just look over the past month of fighting test have lost in the region of 1500 BCs, which if they would have built themselves could have saved them ~5bil, this could be achieved with a single character manufacturing on 10 slots.
2 – Set up a team for T2 ship production, a team of 40 people could easily manufacture 250 cruiser size hulls per week through invention alone to cover all losses. On average the profit per unit is 20mil per unit, substantially higher for logistics and lower for HACs. This would save around 20bil per month; ships that are not used for reimbursements could be exported for sale in Jita.
3 – Manufacture all POS fuel, looking at the POS fueling cost on the spreadsheet it appears that fuel is not being built it is being imported. I favoured the cheaper fuel types in my analysis and estimated that a 4.7% saving could be reached, 3.5bil of POS fuel saved every single month.
Now these are all pretty obvious and to some extent these things may be happening within TEST already, if not then they are paying a heavy price for laziness which makes their current financial situation well deserved. Its pretty simple really *build all the things!*.
These savings are a mere shadow of what TEST could achieve when compared to increase in revenue through better management of their moon assets. The income that TEST appear to generate from their moons is a raw mineral median sell price, its highly possible they are selling in bulk at Jita median as is often done on mailing lists such as ‘bulk trade’.
As this income has always been so good pre tech nerf it appears that big alliances became lazy with little incentive to make even more ISK, this left little guys like myself with an opportunity to take cuts from their profits through taking the moon materials these big alliances were harvesting, reacting them to create advanced materials and making big profits week in week out.
TEST holds the following moons of importance:
16 – Technetium
28 – Neodymium
14 – Dysprosium
2 – Promethium
As soon as I saw these moons I knew the first thing I would do, build nanotransistors! The nanotransistor reaction is a complex reaction:
100 Neomercurite + 100 Platinum Technite + 100 Sulfuric Acid = 1500 Nanotransistors
This reaction uses three processed materials the neomercurite which required Neodymium, platinum technite which requires technetium and sulfuric acid which is extremely cheap and easy to import in bulk.
Lets take a quick look at the Neomercurite and Platinum technite reactions:
100 Neodymium + 100 Mercury = 200 Neomercurite
100 Technetium + 100 Platnium = 200 Platinum Technite
The limiting factor in the volume of production here is the technetium with TEST holding 16 moons, so only 16 of the neodymium moons would be used in the process also. Each of these moons could be reconfigured to complete their corresponding simple reaction (two simple reactions can fit on a POS but I expect that TEST would be left with a bad feeling if they ate up all their control tower CPU and PG with reactors and silos leaving nothing for defenses). This process would provide 3200 Neomercurite and Platinum Technite per hour, enough for 32 complex reactions to produce nanotransistors. The costings are detailed below:
Imported materials per day
38,400 – Mercury – 5,500 per unit – 211,200,000 daily cost
38,400 – Platinum – 4,500 per unit – 172,800,000 daily cost
76,800 – Sulfuric Acid – 4,900 per unit – 376,320,000 daily cost
Additional POS fuel per day
Gallente Fuel Block – 30,720 – 15,000 per unit – 460,800,000 daily cost
Exported materials per day
1,152,000 – Nanotransistors – 6,890 per unit – 7,937,280,000 daily revenue
Profit daily – 6,716,160,000
Profit daily if selling materials raw according to TEST spreadsheet – 5,035,518,444
Daily loss of profit – 1,680,641,556
Monthly loss of profit – 51,119,513,995
The units produced in 1 day is enough for a single week of my personal T2 ship production, the market trades on average 20mil units of nanotransistors per day in Jita alone. This reactions is very sustainable and through running an additional 32 POS would solve all of TESTs profit problems. The fact this isn’t being done now is just lazy, or perhaps *tin foil hats on* it is being done just TEST want us to think they are bad at EVE.
With 16 tech and 16 neo moons being used this would leave TEST with the following moons to play with:
12 – Neodymium
14 – Dysprosium
2 – Promethium
Personally I would take this and react it to create fermionic condensates:
100 Caesarium Cadmide + 100 Dysporite + 100 Fluxed Condensates + 100 Prometium = 200 Fermionic Condenstates
With some imports 24 of these reactions could be run to produce 115,200 units of Fermionic Condensates per day this is half of the average traded volume in Jita daily so may be slightly excessive but it is a good example of what could be done with the rest of the moons.
Imported materials per day:
28,800 – Thulium – 2,800 per unit – 80,640,000 daily cost
28,800 – Cadmium – 2,000 per unit – 57,600,000 daily cost
28,800 – Mercury – 5,500 per unit – 158,400,000 daily cost
24,000 – Promethium – 5,000 per unit – 120,000,000 daily cost
57,600 – Caesarium Cadmide – 4,150 per unit – 239,040,000 daily cost
Additional POS fuel per day
Gallente Fuel Block – 23,040 – 15,000 per unit – 345,600,000 daily cost
Exported materials per day
115,200 – Fermionic Condensates – 20,090 per unit – 2,314,368,000 daily revenue
Profit daily – 1,313,088,000
Profit daily if selling materials raw according to TEST spreadsheet – 969,690,996
Daily loss of profit – 343,397,004
Monthly loss of profit – 10,444,992,205
Whilst this isn’t as big as the previous reaction its still an obvious win here is how things would look in total if test turned their high end materials into Nanotransistors and Fermionic Condensates.
Total monthly loss of profit – 61.6bil
Current loss on accounting spreadsheet – 36.1bil
Profit on accounts if started to react moon materials – 25.5bil
Yes thats 56 POS’s extra to maintain and about 8 Jump Freighters full of materials imported every single week, but it takes a financially crippled alliance and makes them healthily profitable. To put it into numbers that PvP grunts care about your FCs could welp another 2 drake fleets per month whilst still being able to pay the alliance bill!
Someone should be starting to ask the question in TEST right now who is managing our resources and are we getting bang for our buck, because looking at the resources held there is no reason to be making a loss. Actually TEST directors whilst I think about it I’ll happily take a consultancy fee for optimising your moon operations, just do the alliance a favor and kick whatever neanderthal you have managing your resources right now.
Whilst older corporations and alliances can rely on their T2 BPOs to fund their activities that is not a privilege which young alliances such as TEST have. One thing is clear that if the accounts are accurate as posted then something needs to change – PvP alliances, especially in nullsec, can only survive if they maintain a strong industrial backbone.
- Danny Centauri
Disclaimer, this is not a “silver bullet” but should serve as insight to alliance leaders and grunts alike.