Science & Industry

I'm new to industrial and I just finished researching my Ice Harvester I BPO. I almost could not help myself but fill all my 3 manufacture slots with it, but I realized that, if I do so, I would produce over 240 Ice Harvesters I per day, or almost 1700 units per week, and I don't think I can sell them all within 1 week.
So how to avoid overproducing while keep all your manufacture slots occupied all the time? Shall I produce one stuff on Monday, then another stuff on Tuesday, then again another stuff on Wednesday? Or shall I produce some larger stuff, like ships (and then hauling would become a problem for me)?

And is there a place where I can see the daily fulfilled orders' number of a certain item on the market of a certain Region?

thx for replies. And gladly I've already found a buyer for that ice harvester BPO at a good price :D

Tech 1 modules for subcapital ships are very fast to build, and consequentially very easy to accidentally overproduce. Additionally they can be built by alpha clones, and players can make hundreds of alpha characters to vomit out T1 modules. You can't compete with that.

Tech 2 modules are usually a better bet.

Or, if you have the capital behind you, some tech 2 ships can be good.

In my limited experience of doing industry the most important resource is not your blueprint, the input materials, or even manufacturing slots. It is your market orders.

What I mean buy this is that it is your ability to move goods on the market which directly impacts on your ability to make profit. So to maximise your income you need to have as many of your market orders bringing in ISK as possible. This means you need a variety of products, which people need, be selling them in a place where there is good turnover of product, and selling at a price with a reasonable profit margin. Those 1700 Ice Harvester I might be a reasonable quantity to put into a 3 month market order. But don't expect that BPO to be doing much untill those 1700 units are sold, and you can open a new market order with your next batch.

You should seek to have a library of different commodity BPO's. There is ebb and flow in the market, and margins change. For something to be giving you good returns it needs to have a profit margin (including taxes and costs) of at least 10%. Generally speaking if I'm not seeing a 20% margin between the estimated value of input materials, and estiamted value of final product, in the manufacturing preview, then I don't even bother making that item.... What that is indicating is that there is an over supply of that product.

If the market prices for something are rediculously lower than the value of input materials, and you have the liquid ISK to sink into this, you could consider buying out ALL of those low market orders - and then reselling them at a profitable price point along with your own produce. Or if they are at ludicrously low prices you could even buy them out and then reprocess the goods for the scrap material. (You will find this is often the case with low demand meta-modules - as they will frequently sell for less than what the scrap materials are worth). Either of these activities will adsorb market oversupply and allow you to restore a profitable price point...

However, if you are serious about industry, then you need to train good marketing skills to open up a large number of market orders. Then fill them with commodities which move quickly and profitably. What this commodity is can change on a weekly or monthly basis. So you need to keep your eye on the market - and be prepared to adjust your production accordingly.

t2 ships, except for an acute minority, are currently on markets for a large amount under what it would take to manufacture them. It's been a while since I've updated my spreadsheet, but at last check, t2 ship prices would need to rise by AT LEAST 30 to 50% before there was any reasonable amount of profit for manufacturers. I'd hazard a guess that right now, the market is being fueled by stockpiles of completed hulls while people are stockpiling moongoo itself.

So, yea, t2 modules, not t2 ships.

Just as a case study in this.

Look up the drone "Garde II". These were once one of the most popular drones to use in carriers.

These were indirectly nerfed a while back (by a change to carrier mechanics), and so alliances that had stockpiled literally tens of billions of ISK worth of these went into panic sell mode. I bought twenty thousand units (as well as smaller numbers of other T2 sentry drones) at 500-620k ISK per unit.

Recently they were steadily selling in the 770k range, but I knew that the production cost remained over a million ISK per unit, so I sold a bunch of other stock and then bought every Garde II on the market under about 930k ISK, then relisted a bunch of mine at 980k per unit. This buyup cleaned me out of ISK for production, so I then found someone (reasonably ) trustworthy and 'mortgaged' 15000 Garde IIs to them for a 11.5 billion ISK loan.

This let me fund the buyout of all the underpriced Garde IIs with ISK I had. but couldn't really afford to spend.

At one point it actually would have been worthwhile to reprocess Gardes, but I did not realise this at the time. Others did, and made a lot out of it.

So I have checked the volumes in the in-game market history. What do the number of the "orders" and "quantity" mean?