Science & Industry

Thank you for proofing my point. You are a trader.

What you do is buy materials at below their sell price through the use of buy orders. You could then choose to sell said minerals at their actual value and make a good profit. Instead you choose to build something with it to add a rather insignificant amount of extra value to said materials, or in many cases even a reduce their value. That's ok, thousands of people do that and thousands of people don't get it which is why the market for t1 is in such a sad state in the first place.

Let me make it clearer for you, because I actually DO get it and I'd love others to understand too.

Let's assume we have an imaginary friend. Our imaginary friend LOVES to mine and he sells all his minerals to us. In fact, he is even so nice, he sells every mineral to us for 1 isk, regardless of what type it is AND he brings them to our facory station too. On a day, he sells both of us *exactly* enough minerals to build a Dominix at ME 10. Given that a Dominix at ME 10 requires 13,833,502 minerals to build, it costs us 13,833,502 isk. Lucky us!

You immediately pull out your max researched Dominix BPO, fork out 5,9 million industry tax to start a job, for a total cost of just over 19,7 million for a Dominix. You rush it to Jita and quickly sell it for 192 million isk for a hefty profit of 172,3 million isk (let's ignore market tax for now). Excellent job! Unfortunately for you, you just destroyed 3 million isk by building the Dominix.

See, I, actually getting it, put my Dominix BPO in a lab to make a copy. I put the copy on contracts for whatever they sell for nowadays (250k?) and I sell the minerals in Jita by placing a sell order. The value of the minerals is 189,25 million, making my net profit 175,5 million.

These numbers are live from Jita.

Building a Dominix, and about 75% of all the other t1 items costs more than the value of the minerals. It's irrelevant what you paid for the materials. Minerals you mine are not free. For the remaining 25% the effective isk/hr you gain (over selling) from building is not worth your clicks, character and blueprint time.

If you think otherwise, again, you're trading. Which is fine. And makes good isk. It's just not industry.

You keep dreaming that you can do that.

I will also build some t1 goods that sell for 300m, but I will consider 175.5 m of that trade profit, and 124,5m of that manufacturing profit.

I don't think there are enough items with a profit margin that high, but I can consistently get 220-250m out of those 175m in minerals if you want a more realistic picture.

Look up "Opportunity Costs" in economics.

Yes, EVE will teach you economics and then some.

Also the largest hint I can give is eventually you need to train market skills. Buyers (and immediate sells) are usually for pirates who think "these items I stole are free".

No, it's fine as long as the balls don't touch.

Absolutely 100% true.

And if you do this, you'll find that a significant amount of t1 items are not profitable to build and those that are profitable either have very low trade volumes or come with an atrociously low isk/hr for an occupied factory slot.

Can you turn 100mil into 200mil building nothing but tech 1? You absolutely can. The "issue" is that you can turn the same 100m into a lot more than 200m by investing it in something else and if you spend the time you used to turn that profit into, say, blitzing lvl 4's, the difference is even larger.

using a dominix as an example is a straw man argument.

thousands of domis were produced before their inputs were "rebalanced"

they haven't been profitable since.


give us the numbers on frig, destroyer and cruiser hulls when there is a big FW system contest going on and tell us T1 production isnt profitable

What does match your definition of industry then? Can you provide an example?

Also T1 can be profitable when a decent trade hub is along way away.

It's not profitable if you have any assets worth mentioning you'd like to put to work. How many frigates per day would you need to move to make to even hit 1B ISK profit / day? I'll be generous and make that a month. Either way, it'll be many times existing volumes.

That's a 1% monthly ROI if you have 100B to put to work.

I have 90 t2 production pipelines (copying, invention, production -- the works) which took months to skill for but earned me a ton of ISK back in 2009-2010. They're completely idle since I've re-subbed at the tail end of 2014. Yes, I can make a few things with a decent margin, but with either sales volume problems OR a low cost per item limiting the amount if return I can receive. So now my wallet is somewhat huge, but income potential on it is rather slim.

Manufacturing is now 100% trading. In many instances I'm far better off just margin trading the materials.

And absolutely all cost of production should be done with your local trading hub's buy/sell prices. If you're doing anything else you're doing virtual hauling. Instead of manufacturing you could simply courier contract your materials to Jita, and return with finished goods.

Like Bad Bobby I'm moving my production alts to within a jump or two of Jita. Will likely queue up a T1 job per slot for a month, then forget about it.