High Sec Sucks

The announcement of the new FLEX structures at EVE Vegas (why don't they call it EVEgas?) was good news for me as I intended to add the structures to my structure manufacturing lines. But the actual release date for Onslaught raced up on me faster than I expected and it was Monday morning when I realized that this was the week.

I had done no pre-purchasing of parts, no pre-building of components, nothing. Crap.

Well, better late than never. I planned out my purchases, set the buy orders for minerals, and headed to Jita for the more esoteric planetary parts. On the way back I manually piloted gate to gate always on the lookup for problems... but after I passed Udema I got relaxed and I allowed myself to get distracted for 15 minutes after warping to the Balle gate. I got back to my computer and my heart froze: a Macharial was yellow boxing me and had bumped me 76 km off the gate.

Oh Shit.

I knew I was already fucked but I closed the client anyway and logged in an alt that I zoomed over to Balle. I tried to bump the Mach away from bumping me but it was a lost cause. I watched sadly as another newbie ship suicide ran my freighter to keep the timer going.

The Mach pilot opened up a convo with me and asked for a billion ISK to let it go. "I already have a fleet of catalysts on the way, but you pay me and we'll just gank something in Udema." I said no figuring that paying it would only add to my total loss. There is no trust in EVE.

I made a counter offer. "Let me go and then I'll give you 1 bil."

"That's not how this works," he replied.

It was worth a shot.

Finally 15 minutes later (and 25 minutes after I logged out) the catalyst fleet arrived. The end loss was almost 9 billion ISK, of which 1 billion came out my pocket (for the ship), the rest hitting the bottom line of the corporation.

Later I picked myself back up, got back to Jita, got a new freighter, another load of parts, and even more carefully made my way back to base, ready to kill the client at the first sign of anyone looking at me sideways. I made it back without incident.

High sec sucks.

Project Vulcan Phase IV - November Audit Complete

I completed the asset audit on November 30, last day according to my own rules, and was too busy to decide on a dividend payout and write up a report since then.

Real life can be a time suck, you know?

Anyways, here is the report.

The value of the corp at the May audit was approximately 64.6 billion ISK, and as of Nov 30 audit the value increased to ~79.4 billion ISK, a modest 14.8 billion ISK increase. I admit I was disappointed in this result. I figure the decrease in Azbel/Astraus/Raitaru demand as the consumer base has its needs filled coupled with the durability of these products and the saturation of the supply contributed to poor sales volumes. Capital production has been as consistent as last period but contributes not a lot to the bottom line.

I was hoping to make up a lot of ground with Athanor sales but outside of the first few the profit margins were modest. Still, I suspect that a large portion of the 14.8 billion increase came from Athanors.

End result: I've decided on a dividend payout of 10 billion ISK to shareholders which means that shares increase in value a small 7.41% (compared to 28.45%) last audit. The divident payout will be made within 24 hours.

Next week, I'll ruminate on next steps.

Project Vulcan - Audit Time Approacheth

The 6 month audit cycle for Project Vulcan Phase IV is upon us once more!

I've been putting it off while the heat of Lifeblood and mass producing Athanors was in full swing but we've settled down a lot now so I can start gathering all the inventory and pricing it all out.

I have no idea how much the corporation value has increased since May as sales and margins were depressed over the summer, but the uptick of selling 20 Athanors at profit margins ranging from 100 to 2 billion ISK each should boost that number considerably.

Expect the audit to be complete next week.

Audit Final Results

With the audit complete I was able to determine how much I wanted to payout for the dividend and then calculate the new value of shares.

This morning I paid a 20 billion ISK dividend payout to the 4000 shares, and subtracted that from the final numbers for the value of the corp. That still left the corp at a 28.45% increase in value over the 6 month period. I then increased the buyback value of the class 2 shares from 15 million ISK each to 19.2 million ISK each. The handful of outstanding class 1 shares increased in value from 5 million ISK to 6.4 million ISK, and the class 3 shares representing my personal investment increased to an even 9 million ISK.

I do not expect as good results over the next 6 month period simply because the early Azbel sales represented a significant portion of this past period's results. That being said, I'll strive to continue to increase the value of their investment for my shareholders.

Now, off to market to get the factories humming again!

Setback

Project Vulcan Phase IV suffered a setback last week when the alarm clock effort to protect an ally's Azbel in Fliet was insufficient and the capital building structure went boom. Fortunately all the corporation lost was a Moros build and 15 capital shield emitters, as well as the time to get re-setup and decide if I'm moving operations back to NPC station or try another structure.

On the structure building side of things, I re-opened the lines after an audit discovered some old prices were cached and the profit margins for Azbels, Raitarus, and Astrahus citadels are still worth the effort. I'm going to try and avoid having too many structures in flight though, in case markets saturate on me again.

Despite the setbacks the corporation wallet is healthy and plans are being made on what to expand into next. I bought a fuel BPO simply because our Engineering Complex is rigged for it and I had the spare manufacturing slot. Now I'm producing fuel blocks not only for our needs but also for market sale. Win-win.

The big question on the horizon is when are Drilling Platforms coming and how much will those blueprints cost. I'm 99% sure I want in on that action, the only question is what investment level.

Market Blues

It was only a matter of time.

The big stumbling block to producing Azbel Engineering Complexes is simply capital. ISK to buy the blueprint and then ISK to buy the materials to build one. Any high sec NPC station or properly equipped Raitaru can build them.

So its no surprise that the going price for Azbels in the Jita has dropped to below reasonable profitability levels for my small operation.

The supply has continued to increase as more producers came online, and I'm willing to bet demand cluster wide has dropped as the number of corporations looking to own an Azbel for their needs have purchased them already; unlike citadels there is not a low level constant need for them as forward operating bases. Couple that with new producers making use of the material reduction bonuses of Engineering Complexes in null sec and low sec and we can see why the price continues to fall.

And all of that assumes that current producers are taking into account the actual cost of input materials and not using the "if I make it then its free" fallacy.

In the end I'm left with two options: either find a way to cut costs or halt production.

On the first option I'm already building out of a Raitaru with T1 rigs in high sec which gives me a 1% reduction of materials, so the next logical step would be to move into low sec and start producing at an EC there. The downside is that it would complicate logistics and still not make me as efficient as null sec producers with their better rig bonuses.

For the second option, I could halt production until the market self corrects as other casual producers like stop production and the supply drops, slowly driving prices upwards. This assumes that null sec producers making the most profit don't pick up the supply slack.

Based on experience in other high value item markets I'm going to be patient and wait and see while following option 2. I've got two Azbels on the market I'm looking to see if I can move for decent profit and will keep an eye on things. In the meantime, I might look into producing fuel blocks for the growing structure environment of New Eden.

This Operation is Fully Operational

I've doubled my production lines:

First Raitaru was built and hit the market for a nice estimated 900 million ISK profit.