I promised some information in my previous mental wandering about my industry plans and strategy. I had briefly touched on my history in the EVE industry space. It was based more around necessity than anything else. I remember my start very well. I was running a fairly profitable buyback, most items I was dealing in were Tech II guns and fittings. These sold on the local market as fast as I could buy them, at a healthy profit to boot! I noticed I had a lot less contracts when I was looking for only specific things. I needed to broaden my horizon. I was as yet a newbro. I knew there was lots of things I didn’t want. Exploration loot, salvage and NPC loot were all useless to me. I found a buyer for the exploration loot, thank heavens. Who wants to deal with that? Loot was nearly non existent but did come in from time to time. My final decision on it was to keep it all until someone asked or I had a large amount to put on market and it eventually sold. I only had one problem left. Salvage. I did not know what it did. All I knew is it was as expensive as a gold plated pumpkin. They ate into my capital and left me too space poor to continue to buy everything.
A solution was sorely needed. Le Google was overused for a couple of days. What could I do with salvage? Perplexed by being stuck with all of these useless items I finally found an item that used most of the salvage I had in bulk; the Medium Ancillary Currency Router. This item was my savior. I built a huge pile of them with no ME or TE. Who even needs to be more efficient. I was turning two hundred million in salvage into two hundred and fifty million ISK in Medium Ancillary Currency Routers. This enabled me to run full tilt until the incident. If you are curious about the incident, feel free to look up my first article here on EN24.
Fast forward to 2017 and a return to EVE. I knew I wanted something that did not consume much time and could be an asset to my Alliance. I took a deep dive into the world of industry. I now produce non GMO, local and fresh T1 ships. With 5 production slots running full tilt and very few mining skills I had to come up with a way to keep my material stocks up. I turned to the market but quickly bought it out with my needs. I then placed buy orders. Buy orders in Nullsec are nearly useless for large volumes of material. People nearly always use a buyback or contracts, even when there is more money available instantly on the market. How was I to deal with this odd behavior? I started asking in Corp and Alliance chat who had loot, salvage, ore or minerals to sell and offered 90% of Jita buy price. It seems a fair price people are willing to accept and means I am able to keep my prices down to reasonable levels. With my logistical problems largely taken care of (until I finally finish mass production and can quickly add another 5 slots), I needed to move my product.
This brings me to what if feel is one of the keys to Nullsec industry; pricing. At the level I am interested in for industry, if people start demanding 100% of Jita buy my end products simply get 10-15% more expensive. I used the term ‘my level’, not to say I do large volumes or am better at it than anyone, but in referring to the volumes and types of items I have chosen. Moving to T2 or capital production is a whole other ballgame I am not currently concerned with.
Eve is a perplexing place. I took my Slasher to Jita and back. I purchased all T1 BPOs required for the alliance T1 Destroyers. I immediately built 100 of 4 different destroyers as someone in Alliance had posted buy orders for 100 of each at 2mil a piece. This would have been a massive profit. When the ships finished all 4 contracts had been set up with margin trading and they didn’t have the ISK for even one market order, leaving me stuck with ships. I placed them on the market for Jita sell prices. They weren’t moving. At all. I decided it was time to start building the fittings; maybe people were not buying them because the fittings were not available in our pocket. I produced nearly 100 of each fitting and placed them all on the market at Jita sell prices. This was often times ten times cheaper than the current market price, if the parts were even available. I slowly started to gain traction. I sold 3-4 ships and fits to match in a day. At this rate, in a mere 3 months I would sell off 2 weeks worth of production. Yay! Wait…
This is not a solid business case. Since I am a business man and not a politician, I needed to turn some capital over. I noticed people always said, ‘that ship is on contract’. Seemed odd to me they could buy the entire fit off the market for 2mil using buy all, yet they seemed to consistently pay 10mil for the same ship on a contract. It is an important note that there was about 3mil in Ammo and Paste in the fit that I did not produce myself. Even still, it was a matter of doubling profit simply for hitting multifit and posting the contract.
The wheels of my industrialist brain began to turn.
Then the hamster died and the wheel stopped.
After complaining to Amazon, a new Hamster was delivered via drone and the work continued.
I began to put my ships on contract instead of the market. I started selling 3-4 a day on market and 5-10 a day on contracts at 6mil a unit. This was still not the full capacity of my production abilities but it was a strong start. I moved into other things like medium rigs and a random assortment of T1 items. Things like Warp core stabilizers and Salvagers turned out to be quite profitable and a quick turn over, despite not being in any doctrines.
I have started to look into T2 doctrine production. There is way too many moving parts for me right now. I really enjoy hitting ‘build now’ and being done, as long as I have the materials, which I usually do. My next steps will likely be T1 hulls for bigger fleet doctrines. I will keep you posted!
While we are discussing odd EVE player conditions I feel I would be remiss if we did not touch on local production. When I first started producing I was competing with ludicrously overpriced fits brought in via jump freighter from Jita or Amarr. As I slowly built my presence on the market and then on contracts, the competition really slowed down. As people realized they could get everything they needed in our own station, more and more people opted to buy local. Now this keeps our ratting ISK in our own wallets. This allows me to buy the loot and salvage off people with money I got from them, which they earned through ratting. This means one million ISK can transfer within the Alliance 3-4 times and we all have one million more in materials, ships, liquid ISK etc. in our lives. If we immediately export to Jita, we allow our enemies to make profit on that item a few times before we end up buying it back and shipping it both ways. Now of course this is reasonable for a few things. It is my personal belief that a very small percentage of a smart Alliances logistical effort will be in jump freighters and the rest will be on local production.
And with that random thought aside, I will wrap things up with a simple request; Buy Local!
I would vote for Trump in EVE as I am anti-export in Eve (I may or may not be an exporter in real life and have different views). Keep your own alliance in the money and have a lot of fun learning and making mistakes with industry! Do you have any stories of how you got into industry?
