Manufacturing - 2 months in

Its been a while since I have written exclusively on my manufacturing alt.

I have been very pleasantly surprised at how profitable manufacturing is compared to my initial expectations.  October was my first full month running at speed and I made profits of 2bn ISK whilst spending only 10 minutes per day at the most on it.

I am halfway through the current month and I have made 1.7bn ISK profits.

Of all my activities I believe manufacturing is the leasst time consuming time of financing the purchase of Plex.

My strategy is similar to that I adopt in trading: I focus on the low volume, high margin items.  The 0.01 players leave these alone given the low volume of sales per day.  I don't focus at all on the high volume items such as ammunition.

I have a spreadsheet set up on Excel 2007 which downloads the Jita prices (from Eve Central) of the items I am selling and all the raw materials to compare the profit margins and so indicate to me which I should be producing.  In all, this spreadsheet monitors 49 items so far, and the list is growing.

At present I regularly sell 26 items which at the present time is making me profits of 2bn ISK per month - hopefully 3bn this month but we will see, I am away for over half the month on business.  If I sell 3 items a day giving me 35m ISK profit each then I am a happy pilot.

I own over 1bn ISK of Blueprints (which I class as expenses and hence the 2bn Profits in October covered the costs of these Blueprints).

I sell in Jita and I manufacture in the Lonetrek region.  The Lonetrek region is right next door to Jita and there are always plenty of spare manufacturing slots.

I am expanding my operations into other regions to see if I can enhance my sales - so far it has started slowly but it is early days.

When I started manufacturing it was industrial ships - as of today, they would all be loss making.  Has been over a month since I sold my last manufactured ship.

The great part about manufacturing is that so far it is very low maintenance.  Even assuming I need to buy materials to manufacture 11 items + ship them to my manufacturing station + set up the manufacturing operations + get them to Jita to sell + update all sell orders then at the most it is 10 minutes.

I greatly suspect I could have financed the ongoing purchase of Plex if I had started in manufacturing - but that is not as certain as trading.  The time taken to learn the required skills is perhaps more of a hurdle earlier in the process.

Going forwards I am merely plan to expand the number items I manufacture for now.  I also am learning Spaceship Command skills given I suspect this alt will be the alt that hauls items around once my manufacturing operations expand into other regions.



My current relevant skills are:

• Mass Production 5 and Advanced Mass Production 5 allows me to manufacture 11 product items at once.  Many blogs I read don't learn Advanced Mass Production 5 given the time it takes - but the one downside on being away on business a lot is that time is available to set an alt up to lean a skill that takes 30 days!

• Production Efficiency 5 allows me to use less materials to manufacture items

• Industry 5 allows me to manufacture items quicker and is required to progress in other skills

• Supply Chain Management 5 allows me to start a manufacturing job from anywhere in the same region - I am not really using this at present but I expect to use to more when I move my manufacturing operations away from Jita.

• I then have various skills that allow me to manufacture certain items such as Mechanics 5, Hull Upgrades 2, CPU Management 5, various Rigging skills, Science 5,

• Contracting 2 - allows me to set up 11 contracts to haul my items around

and because this alt places its sell orders to sell its items I have also trained in:

• Daytrading 3 - allows me to modify my sell orders up to 11 jumps away in the same Region

• Marketing 3 - allows me to place sell orders up to 10 jumps away and is required to learn other skills

• Retail 4 and Trade 4 - allows me to place a total of 53 Buy and Sell orders

• Cybernetics 4 - allows me to get the Standard implants for faster learning