Corp Industry management

So in order to scale my industry effectively, in highsec at least, I've been exploring how to have assets accessible by anyone in the corp so that I don't have to make a bunch of item exchange contracts to move assets between characters on the same account. it seems what I wanted to do is possible, if a little unintuitive.

First, you need a corp, obviously. Then, in your station or upwell structure you need to rent an office. I am operating out of a Raitaru in Ikuchi that is not owned by my corp, but I am able to rent a corp office there for 10,000ISK a month. I just need to remember to have that amount in my corp wallet. This should give you a bunch of corp hangers to use:

In order to rename these (like I have done) go to the corporation window as the CEO and select the "Divisions" button:

You can then rename these as you wish. Then you can put items/blueprints into the hangars, and when doing industry jobs you can select the input/output hangars for blueprints owned by corp:

And that's it! With this I can just have the one character do the buying/selling in Jita and transporting, while having full view of all my available blueprints and stockpiles and my other characters remain in situ and operate out of what gets brought in. No contracts required!

October Update - Industry

My second Industry Update. I've done a bit of scaling here, and started out in Null. Enjoying it so far even though there is a lot that I need to learn! My current totals:

And here is my jEveAssets graph:

My current net worth is 854.6 Million ISK. That is an increase of 630.8 Mil, or 20.3Mil ISK/day. That's OK but slightly disappointing if I'm honest. I had really hoped to break the Billion, and 20 mil/day across what is now 3 characters is not amazing, though it has started spiking  recently as the graph shows. I was also away for 4 days towards the end of the month. I suspect if I had been here for those I would have broken the Billion mark, so maybe not as bad as I think.

I have made several advancements this month though. First I created a new account and moved a character to null. The way things are done is definitely different in null. I have to do my industry 3 jumps away from Horde's main staging to take advantage of the Sotiyo for manufacturing and other structures for research/reactions, so I'm currently hauling in a Tayra. This isn't ideal, but it's working at the moment. There are alliance hauling services which I've primarily used to move things to or from Jita but they also do moves within null. I don't really feel I'm at the place where I want to utilise that yet though. My hauls are too small to warrant it. Also the hauling takes a day or so to go to/from Jita, which is slow enough. I'm not at the scale yet where I can wait that long for every job.

Secondly I have made another highsec character to get more job slots, and created a corp to share funds etc. I still need to work out how best to store Blueprints for corp use and pool the outcomes so I don't have to make item exchange contracts to get the stuff to/from my Jita seller. Very much a work in progress here but vital to get right if I'm going to scale this at all.

Early on with T1 manufacturing I have noticed a pattern emerging though. A gap of high profitability opens on an item, it can be ridden to fast profits for a while, then people realise and flood the market and the profitability drops off again. First month it was Cap Boosters that I got a lot out of, this month it was Mobile Depots. For almost the entire month I was able to build them for 1.6mil each from an unresearched BPO, 1.5mil researched, and sell them for 1.9mil. They would also fly off the shelves. I could put up 100 and within an hour they would all be gone. This was great and I scaled this to at one point 12 production lines, but the price has dropped to about 1.75mil. Still profitable with researched BPOs but not worth going crazy about. I've started exploring rigs as an alternative but I think this is going to be the nature of the beast with production.

So, how am I doing versus my overall targets?

• Invent a t2 item
• sell a blueprint copy
• sell a researched blueprint original - Success!
• Build my own Upwell structure
• Complete some reactions - I've completed 1, I still need to research this as I haven't even sold the result of my first one yet.
• Build a capital
• Build a Super
• Build a Titan
• Earn 1 Trillion

I wasn't expecting to do much more than this this month, but nice to get something ticked off early.

Last month's targets:

• Reach 1 Billion - Failed, but close
• start up an extra account - done
• Move a character to Null - done
• Build something in Null - done
• Add an extra high sec character - done

Pretty good versus my targets actually

Targets for next month:

• Earn 1 Billion
• Build a T2 rig
• Invent a T2 item
• Do more reactions

As you can see, this month targets revolve around getting into tech 2 to work that out. I keep hearing this is where the money is, so let's find out!

October Update - Trading

 Another interesting month for a couple of reasons, though I maintain it has been a good one. My current position:

My current net worth is 982.7Bn ISK, an increase of 31.5Bn ISK, or 1.01Bn ISK/day. 

This is at least positive, but well below where I was, so why do I think this was a good month? 2 main reasons. 1, I started a new industry account, paying 20.2Bn for 1 years PLEX. I have now spent a total of 39.3Bn ISK starting up industry accounts. If I hadn't done this then my monthly profits would be 51.5Bn ISK, which is actually pretty good. 

The second reason is, against all odds the price of HyperCores have come down this month. I am honestly baffled by this one. The 2 for 1 sale ended, and PLEX has been spiking, so the true price for a HyperCore should be about 580,000ISK now, but it's going for 292,000 at the time of writing. I know a lot more people bought a lot more this time, so the stores people have are huge and some people will gladly cash out for a couple of % profit but the fact it's dropped by 5,000 in a month is insane. If it had just held level I'd be 3Bn ISK better off.

On the flip side of this I have cashed out several of my investments for a profits, Logic circuits in particular have done well for me, so it's not all bad. Considering I have hardly touched any characters other than my big 4 sellers (Amarr, Dodixie, Rens and Hek) and my null trader a bit, I'd call this a successful month.

I'm enjoying my Industry and the minute, so I think I'm going to continue to focus on these characters primarily and consolidate my trading to keep the required time down to a minimum. If I can continue to maintain 50Bn a month for this level of effort I'll be pretty happy as it allows me plenty of time for other things.

So looking at last months plans:

• Hit 1 Trillion - Nope, though I would be if I didn't start another account. Will do definitely this month.
• Increase the amount invested in my BAU trading rather than investments. - Sort of, I still have 246Bn in investments, but my money for BAU trading has increased a little. I think this'll be an ongoing thing really.

Targets for this month:

• Hit 1 Trillion. Again.
• Increase the amount invested in my BAU trading rather than investments.
• Move the majority of my stock from Tash-Murkon to Amarr to liquidate and repurpose this character. Tash-Murkon frequently has expiries, and it's just not working out. I need a wholesale rethink here.

Similar to last month overall, but a rhythm I'm mostly happy with given the time investment involved.

A Corp and a second highsec character

 So I'm at a point where my first highsec character is OK skills wise, and is chewing his way through Advanced Broker Relations V. I also seem to be generating a surplus of ISK with what I'm producing, and could use some more slots.

So I've done 2 things. One is to create a corp for my highsec characters. I will use this to transfer money around easily, and I think I can set blueprints to be corp owned and used by my characters. If I can that'd be a huge usability win. TBD on that one.

The second is to create a new character. I've injected mass production and begun production and research in Ikuchi alongside my initial character. This takes my total industry characters to 3. The items I'm producing now sell like hot cakes and so I think I can up my production lines without even changing items and take advantage. It's not the best idea to put so much in one basket but the initial BPO is 1 mil each and each day I'm producing about 2 mil profit per line per day, so even if the margin collapses tomorrow and I have to switch wholesale then I've already paid the BPO costs off many times over. 

I had hoped to get to this point sooner but I've been away for a few days with family. I still have more to look into with this and plenty more to explore to optimise my null character, but it's nice to begin scaling to more production lines.

My first Reaction

 One thing I've never done in EVE is reactions. I knew they are used to turn moon goo into tech 2 stuff, and that they're complicated and not doable in high sec, but that's it. I've heard they can be lucrative though so I've been keen to check them out since starting this challenge.

A few things I've learned since researching them:

• Reactions are done using formulae, which are seeded by NPCs all over the place (for 10, 15 or 20mil depending on the "tier")
• These formulae cannot be researched like blueprints, but are infinite runs
• they mostly have 4 inputs, fuel blocks and 3 other ingredients.

MJ- has a reactions structure in system, but apparently different structures only support certain types of reactions. Therefore I've had to head over to the industry park to find a suitable structure. I'm beginning to understand why it's named that. 

Also, when I was looking for a reaction to run I was struggling to find one that was profitable at all. I eventually worked out that while they are run in low/null/wormholes it seems most people must either buy their mats in bulk or import from Jita, and that's where the market for the outputs is.

I was surprised, as I was hoping to run reactions and sell the outputs in null, but it seems there's almost no market for that. I was also surprised at how little money most reactions make from browsing using Jita prices and a null structure. Either I'm missing something or most people are reacting to do vertically integrated t2 production and not selling the intermediates. I am hoping to use my reaction slots similarly to my manufacturing ones, i.e. put in mats get out items to sell.

I did eventually manage to find something with good margins and had them contracted to null:

which looks something like this in the industry window:

This is only a very small run, but my budget is pretty small at this point. My plan is to run this and then export the results back to Jita to sell. 

I feel there's a lot I don't know here, but it's good to get started at least.

Getting set up in Null

 After a little wait (36 hours) my alt was accepted into Pandemic Horde and I was able to start the setup in null. First things first, set my home station to the nullsec staging (where the market is) and self destructing my pod to teleport out there. 

Next is to set up my Overview etc. so I can travel around safely.

After all that is done I can start looking at the industry. There are more complications to it than in highsec. For one thing, the BPC market is essentially non-existent and limited primarily to capital parts and metenox moon drills. Not something I'm interested in. So I think I'll have to operate from BPOs out here. 

Looking at the maps, there are Azbels/Raitarus with rigs available for anything you can think of, which is nice. I have a couple of choices when it comes to where to set up. There is a basic Azbel for ship building in system, which I use in the industry window to determine profitability, and there are also rigged structures in an "industry park" in another region, in the old home of R10-. I will probably operate out of here long term, it is in another region but with Ansiblex jump gates it's only a couple of jumps so not a big deal logistically. In addition to a greater range of rigged structures this "industry park" also has a lower system cost index by virtue of being ever so slightly inconvenient. 

Initially though I think I'll operate out of MJ while I get things set up.

I looked through a few old favourites to determine profitability. Mobile Depots look more profitable here though the volume is a lot lower. Something to bear in mind. There were a couple of drones and a rig that look good to me as well. So I bought 2 of each BPO, one to use and one to research at the same time. 

I then encountered the other complication with working out here, I have to use a alliance logistics service to transport my items from Jita. In this case it's a few low cost BPOs so the cost is trivial, but I have no guarantee how long it will take to arrive. I guess I'll just have to wait and in the meantime I can buy a Venture and get some mining done and get the lay of the land. Excited to see how this scales versus high  sec!

A second industry account

 So about a month into this new journey I feel I've hit the point where I need more characters. 

My initial character has 10 production slots and 8 research slots which I am mostly utilising, and I have north of 400mil net worth now. I'm starting to see a build up in ISK in my wallet at times so a second character could be usefully utilised, but I don't want to stop skill training on this account. I've been training trade skills including advanced broker relations (the adjusting fees are killing me!) and also improving my piloting and fitting skills to reduce the chance of being ganked going to and from Jita.

Another aspect in this decision is I'd like to start in null and see what that is like. Also my trading is going well this month with me rapidly heading back towards a trillion. 

So I repeated the same process as last time, using a refer a friend link to create a new account and get a free 1 million skillpoints. This time though I skipped the tutorial and career agents and instead headed for Jita and put in an application to Pandemic Horde. Applications can take a couple of days to go through.

I also transferred 50 million from my other industry character to this new one to set himself up and buy starting things he needs. After buying a years Omega time using my trade characters (for slightly over 20Bn, ouch!) I bought a few skills, set up a skill queue and used my 1 mil SP. This got me to 6 manufacturing jobs, 5 science and 5 reactions. In addition to a few other supporting skills. 

I plan to do a few build runs in high sec with this guy while I wait for my app to null to be accepted, at which point I'll jump straight into null and scope out the new world of industry down there!