Citadel Tax changes

I am now back from my holiday, and whilst I was away, the "Citadel" patch went live on TQ.

This release was massive, releasing new citadel structures, capital ships, hundreds of capital mods, capital NPCs, changes to wormholes, and amongst a plethora of others, a massive tax hike. From the patch notes:

• Market: markets currently have two taxes, transaction's tax, applied for sold items, and broker's fee for non immediate orders, which are set at 1.5% and 1% respectively. To create an environment more competitive for Citadels, we plan on increasing the transaction tax to 2.5% and the broker's fee to 5-6%. Players trading in citadels will still receive the transaction tax, but the broker's fee will be at the complete discretion of the owner. To avoid confusion for the owner, the broker relations skill will not affect player set broker's fee in Citadels.

Until someone creates a "Jita 4-4 Citadel" which I can't see happening any time soon, or possibly ever due to high sec war mechanics, we can safely ignore the broker fees in citadels, as I won't be using one.

However, this does mean that buying from a sell order (with no skills or standings) and setting up a new sell order in a different hub used to cost a total of 1.5 + 1 + 1.5 = 4% of an items value in taxes. Under the new system this would cost 2.5 + 2.5 + 6 = 11% of an items value in taxes! This is HUGE!

In reality, all of my trading characters have broker relations/accounting of at least 4, which brings the Broker Fee to 3% and transaction tax to 1%. This still leads to 5% cost lost to taxes, much more than before. What this means to me is an immediate loss in profit, as the margins on items have not immediately changed, and it will likely be a while before they do (existing stock sitting around etc.). It also means that a lot of my items I was trading with a profit margin of 10% or sometimes less will no longer be profitable, or will be but not much. I try to stick to items with 20% profit margins, but as prices swing this is not always possible, plus an item that costs 400 million with a 10% profit margin is still 40 million in profit, minus taxes. This will no longer be viable, so I'll likely have to have a wholesale rethink in what I buy and trade.

This will not be the end of regional trading as a few doomsayers on the forums suspect, but it will require a rethink, and may well hit my profits until I do.