Science & Industry

Hi,
I have started on my first foray into producing T2 materials,namely Tungsten Carbide.

My set up is a Small Amarr Tower which is mining the Tungsten,
and a Large Amarr Tower which mines the Evaporite Deposits and the Atmospheric Gasses needed to make the Sulfuric Acid,
and it also houses my complex reactor.

I have to import the Platinum from hisec.

Basically,now that the tower is spewing out the Tungsten Carbide,I have run the figures,and it looks like I am barely going to break even after buying in the platium and fuel costs. Can this be correct?

To expand on this further, everything has highs and lows ... so when you checked a month ago (you did check the profitability of this FIRST, right?), the numbers were different than now.

If you can weather the slump, it'll (eventually) pick up again.

I agree T2 mats are at a low right now. They will come back up, this market seems to be very volatile for quite some time.

I expect much of this volatility to due to the manner of supply. Many moon miners what until they have a full jump freighter load before taking it to market. If you get several jump freighter loads of the same T2 mat come in within a few days it will generally cause an over supply resulting in a drop in price.

I am not sure what stats you are using to calculate your profits. using but orders you can get the platinum significantly cheaper than buying off sell orders, as well you will get more for your tungsten carbide posting it on sell orders and waiting for it to sell rather than dumping to buy orders. You may already be doing this, but it does make a big difference in profits.

Also there is the matter of POS fuel. Since you already have a decent presence in low/null where your mining and reaction towers are you should have very little problem setting up PI to cover much of your fuel bill. I am not suggesting that PI mats you produce yourself are free, but by producing your own PI and importing the ICE products, which are also very cheap right now, you can produce fuel blocks much cheaper than you can buy them. I have a large PI network set up myself for the purpose of producing fuel blocks. the profits are good enough that I buy all my ICE products, I used to mine my own ice but it is just not worth the time with prices so low. I make enough of this to fuel my POS, buy all the needed ICE products, and still make about 100M per week off selling the extra fuel blocks I do not need myself.

If you are buying your fuel, producing it yourself could really drop the costs of running your towers. Even at 12,000 isk per block you can make it much cheaper. Although you may need to up your small tower to a medium if you need the space to anchor a ammo assembly array to build the fuel blocks.

It doesn't really make a big difference in profit of the manufacturing step, though - it mostly just introduces an additional trading profit.

Predicting prices and futures when they can be easily manipulated and have a solid history of said manipulation is folley.

When prices are falling you should be watching to keep potential losses at a minimum, AKA market instability can and WILL effect investors profusely.

Tread wisely.