The strip miner business is going smoothly. Since last month, I have been able to reduce waste on the laser manufacturing process by 12% by training up my production efficiency skill. A miner that use to have a 25% waste factor has been reduced to merely 13%, and sometimes 9% for parts that require the rarer, more expensive refined minerals. This means margins have increased. Before, it used to take 1.5 million ISKs to create a miner, now it takes 1.35 million ISKs; an 10% cost reduction on every unit I make.
Marketing and distribution
Manufacturing is the easiest part of this enterprise. It take no more than collecting the required materials in the appropriate amounts, a blueprint, and clicking on a button. Setup cost and running cost of production is negligible. Anyone can use a manufacturing spot on a space station, the availability of which is driven by supply and demand.
The real cost is in the time it takes to transport materials into the manufacturing station and selling the finished products. I use to manufacture in large bulks and sell them in bulks with a single price. However, In EVE, products have no brands, and therefore distribution and pricing are the only strategies. I discovered that I can make more money if I produce in fewer batches.
By producing in smaller batches, I can price my products according to the supply and demand at several different points in time as oppose to one point in time. Smaller batches are also easier to sell because the market lists the sellers from the least amount of a product on escrow to the most amount of a product on the market. I was able to achieve 80% sales within the first hour of putting my products in the market as oppose to days when placing them in bulks.
There are times, however, when an industrialist with a better researched blueprint flood the market with hundreds of units of strip miners at fire sale prices. No other prices come even close and the other products takes days, even weeks to sell. Eventually, when those cheap miners gets sold, there is a surprising lull in the market as the other manufacturers have basically gave it up for a few days. During this time, the rest of the products gets slowly cleared from market and a shortage occurs. I stumbled on to this lull one or two times and was able to price my miners at ridiculous prices and have them sold within 2 to 3 hours.
