Industry assets

Industry is above everything a matter of making more isks with isks you already have (or have borrowed). Capitas are mandatory in EVE if you want to go anywhere and especially when it comes to production. So i figured breaking down what industrial assets are and then detail my own assets could form a good first post.

Assets can come in many forms, a necessary notion to get when we talk about assets is the liquidity of the asset to estimate its real value and the time you'll stick with it. 

An item is more or less solid or liquid in terms of "how quickly can I turn this into ISKs ?". Isks being the money used for most of our market purchases, it is safe to assume it is the liquidity, hence the following analogy. The easier it is to transform items into isks, the more liquid the asset is.

Of course, you can firesell most of your assets in Jita 4-4 using buy orders, but by doing so, you will lose a lot of value from your assets and this isn't what we are looking forward to do. Ideally, we want to sell at the best margin for ourselves. 

Simply said, how easy is it to sell ... ?

• Researched blueprints (originals) : the least liquid of all assets, a BPO is extremely hard to sell simply because the demand is extremely restrained and most of it will actually do their own research in optimized facilities for such duties.
• XL ships : freighters, capital ships, can be hard to sell if you do not have a direct demand for those. We can also add that ships such as Black Ops or Marauders also fit that bill considered their efty price tag. As an example, around 10 providence and Sin are sold per day. it is an extremely limited amount when you compare with, for an example, a Nemesis class Stealth Bomber that can sell up to 100 of units per day.
• Citadels and citadel equipement : the most emblematic image of such difficulty to sell are structure rigs, almost no sale happen for structure rigs due to the efty price tag and the fact the blueprint originals are only 100 M isks.  As such, selling those at a non sacrified price can prove to be quite the hassle in some cases
• Niche ships : by their name, it is easy to guess most of the XL class ships also fall in this category. By their name, it is easy to guess their demand is limited, but it is living, so here goes to that
• Large sized ships, off meta ships : they are not the pinacle of the meta, they are not the hot thing called into fleets (FC can i bring my drake ?) but they will sell if you provide attention to your sell orders. 
• Faction ships : are relatively easy to sell in Jita 4-4 or trade hubs. We are entering in the realm of liquid assets that turn easily into cash.
• Common ships, meta ships, meta items, rigs tier II and highly requested tier II : also easy to transform into isks, depending on your volumes, one quick upload of your orders every day will get you rid of all your stock in less than a week.
• Salvage, research material, tags, ammos : all have a solid demand all around new eden, can't go wrong putting a sell order with those
• Ores, PLEXs : the easiest thing to sell in EVE mostly due to their core nature to the game. Please note i added PLEX on this level, but one must take into consideration PLEX is also a speculative item. and as such, it's placement in this list could vary depending on your use of the PLEX.
• Isks themselves : the money that vanishes from your wallet faster than you can say "spodbrain" when you have a fit in mind and find your pod in jita or your favorite trade hub.

When estimating how much your industry costs to run, you need to then separate what will be tangible fixed assets. Those are the most solid of the items of the list, a citadel, a XL ship and other similar high cost blueprints are things you will stick in the long term.

They differ from the other production assets that are consummed by the production process (minerals, fuel) which generally have a much lower cost.

So, what does an industrialist needs to get started ?

Someone can start on the side very quickly with limited assets : 50M isks, a ship, a small blueprint or two and a dream. Checking around the tool EVE industry, you can quickly determine what you need in terms of isks to buy the base materials.

To that first announced cost, you must add the blueprint of course. You will have to reinburse it. Ease up your mind : see it as investment that will stick with you till it blows up. As such treat it carefully and move it around with care.
Researching a blueprint before starting to manufacture from it is a key element to the success of an industrial endeavour.

The only begginer solid asset would be blueprints

To that, you need a bit of extra isks to acquit yourself of the taxes : production taxes and sell order taxes.

When an activity expands, so will the amount of money invested into assets helping running the production. This is caused by a two fold effect :

1. The thrive for bigger volume, gross income, net income : that will push most industrialist and players in general to buy bigger, more specialised ships. But you'll also need more blueprints, more lines of production, faster lines of production. All of which have a cost.
2. The search for security : the more valuable your production become, the more paranoid you should become. This is EVE after all. Investing in better tanking module, a transport ship or even a really well tanked interdictor for blueprints are step one player might take.

For security and conveniency, one might want their own citadel to speed up production time, I will try to discuss about the advantages of owning your own structure in another post.

In the end, we return to the original conundrum, you need more isks to print more isks.

Where am I in all of that ?

I produce Tech 3 destroyers, this activity is highly lucrative and makes my enjoyment since i started  doing it a few months ago. This part of production is highly skill intensive with a skill floor of at least 4M sp which drives a lot of possible concurrents away.

I will dedicate an article to my own approach to their production later. You can also check the "useful links" page for directions toward the eve wiki articles related to production.

I have around 8 billions isks invested in production assets that can be broke down in the following manner :

• Providence class freighter : 900M
• Fully fitted and rigged raitaru + 2 months of fuel : 1500M 
• Prowler class transport ship  rigged for speed : 180M
• Mastodon class transport ship full tank : 500M
• Components blueprint library : 300M
• Reactions blueprint library : 300M
• Materials in production : 3000M
• Blueprints copies prepared for use (T3Ds) : 500M (cost to produce those blueprints)
• End product in sale : 1000M

Total : 8190M isks, A.K.A 8.19B isks

A few highlights from this list : 

1580M isks, also known as 19.3% of the assets are ship related

600M isks (7.3%) are blueprint orignals or reaction originals (entering in one of the worst liquid category)

3000M isks, (36.6%) of the capital are strictly related to the production part, all the rest is, as such, added costs or unrelated capitas frozen the production necessitates to work properly.

500M isks (6.1%) are related to blueprint copies, this high amount of mostly related to the fact we produced T3D which have a high cost per copy ratio.

Rule of the thumb 

For each isk in production, prepare another isk to freeze in assets. 

This ratio increases with the size of your production and other factors such as your risk adversity, but this element shall never be neglected.

I hope this first article was enjoyable and I wish you an industrious time