Business Guide v1
Day 878, 01:51
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Published in Greece 
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by
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by Buck Roger
Okay, so it isn't pretty, but it might make you pretty rich.
1. Starting capital
1a - Self-funded
1b - Partners
1c - Cooperatives
1d - How much do I need?
2. Research
2a - Country
2b - Demand
2c - Workforce
2d - Taxes
2e - Competition
2f - How do I find possible profit?
3. Industry
3a - Land
3b - Food
3c - Weapons
3d - Gifts
3e - Moving Tickets
3f - Houses
3g - What industry should I choose?
4. Hiring Basics
4a - Quantity VS Margin
4b - Quality of company
4c - Employee wellness
4d - Max Productivity
5. Hiring is Half the Battle
5a - It's Okay to Be Evil
5b - No, It's Not
5c - Papa Smurf Company
5d - Me and My Home Boys
5e - Just Fishing
5f - Too Rich for My Blood
5g - Rotating Door Company
6. Skill Level Lore
6a - Newbies are good employees
6b - 1 is the Loneliest Number
6c - 2 is as bad as 1
6d - Skill 3 is Key
6e - Skill 4 is Magic
6f - Skill 5 to 6 for Kicks
6g - Skill 7 for Fun and Profit
7. Sales
7a - Watching your industry
7b - To stockpile or not to stockpile?
7c - To undercut or not to undercut?
7d - To export?
8. Moneychanging
8a - Buying currency
8b - Selling currency
8c - Wait, why don't I just make money with this?
9. Raw Materials
9a - Understanding Quality
9b - Finding cheap Raw Materials
9c - Donating cheap Raw Materials
10. Exit, Upgrade, Expand?
10a - Exit
10b - Upgrade
10c - Expand
1. Starting Capital
1a - Self-funded
If you want the least hassle and to keep the rewards (and risks) to yourself, you will fund your company yourself. Citizens create all the GOLD in eRepublik. They do so by paying with a credit card or PayPal, by using incentivized offers, or by obtaining a treasure map for any of these reasons:
Getting a medal. For most people, this means Hard Worker or Super Soldier, but all of them have the same reward.
Leveling up to 6 or at every level from 16 and after.
Referring a friend who makes it to level 6.
You can also exchange your currency into GOLD using the monetary market (see "Moneychanging" below). Using only these methods, it may take three months or more until you have the capital you need. But it will be all yours, and you won't need to use PayPal.
1b - Partners
The types of arrangements that can be made vary. Here are just some of them:
You work as a manager of a company for someone who doesn't have the time.
You and your best friend each put in half the GOLD and take half the profit, sharing responsibilities over running the company.
Your friend loans you half the GOLD, and you promise to pay back a certain amount each month.
You talk to a banking organization and present your business plan. You get a loan and pay it back.
You and two friends each put in a certain amount, while you run it and pay dividends to your friends.
Keep your ear to the ground and ask around if you want to go into a partnership.
1c - Cooperatives
These can be grassroots, with 10 players who come together and each contribute the same amount and agree on their terms. They can also be institutional, with a controlling Organization requiring dues up front to work at the cooperative. Cooperatives scale very well for Q1 and Q2 because the cost of each worker slot is only 2 or 4 GOLD. They face scaling issues as they approach Q4 and Q5, where the investment of each worker would need to be 19 GOLD or 39 GOLD in a Manufacture company, which is not to say it couldn't be done but only that it is not as common. You can often find cooperatives associated with leftist political parties, but it isn't a requirement. There are indeed real competitive advantages to a company that knows who its workers are and where the worker knows that higher production means a higher salary. Other than observations on hiring, most comments here apply to cooperatives.
1d - How much do I need?
The first thing needed is an Organization. If you haven't got one, create it with 5 GOLD. For now you can use that to store items and to buy things cheaply. Your company should be held on the Organization, even though the game gives you the option to run a company on your citizen, cost yourself wellness, fail to advance in your job skill, and fail to earn Hard Worker. After you have the organization (that 5 GOLD is not computed into the following), you would need the following amounts to create a company out of nothing:
Q1 = 20 GOLD
Q2 = 40 GOLD
Q3 = 90 GOLD
Q4 = 190 GOLD
Q5 = 390 GOLD
If there are any companies of that Quality and in an appropriate region (important for Land!) that are these prices or lower, you should always buy them from "Companies for Sale" rather than creating them. You can consider the value of the stock and RM into the value of the company, but you should also consider that these values may change, so make sure it is indeed a bargain. You usually shouldn't pay more than 10 GOLD per export license and only if they are ones you'd want anyway. You should never pay more than 20 GOLD extra, no matter how many export licenses there are, because you will usually be better off buying the one export license that will be best today than you would be having lots of mediocre ones. Export licenses that are inactive or may easily become inactive are of no value. For more on export licenses, see 7d, "To export?"
You don't just need the company, however. You want enough raw materials and salaries to last about a week (at least three or four days), as you start recruiting employees and trying to make your company efficient and turn a profit. This means, roughly:
Q1 = 6 GOLD (about 10 GOLD for Houses)
Q2 = 8 GOLD (about 15 GOLD for Houses)
Q3 = 10 GOLD (about 30 GOLD for Houses)
Q4 = 15 GOLD (about 50 GOLD for Houses)
Q5 = 20 GOLD (about 60 GOLD for Houses)
These are just rough estimates and assume that you may not sell your first House made right away. Moreover, several advanced strategies for selling, which require stockpiling, require that you have more capital than listed above.
2 - Research
2a - Country
You should know a lot about the country in which you invest. You must browse the press a little to know the most common language(s) spoken, you must review its military history to determine what possible gains or losses of regions may occur, you must look at the Economy page to see all taxes and at the Administration page to look for recent tax changes. You must know whether there is a significant mature playerbase and also whether there have been any recent baby booms, to understand what kind of market and workers you can expect. You must know roughly how many active players there are and whether there are already way too many companies relative to the number of players. You absolutely must know which High Land resources are in the country and where they are. The more you know, the better it is for you when deciding how to invest.
2b - Demand
Countries that have expanded into empires or that have lots of Mutual Protection Pacts get into more wars and therefore sell more Weapons. This is a fundamental factor that should not be underestimated for the sale of Weapons. Countries that have a highly active political scene are more likely to sell more Tickets for congressional elections. Every country needs Food, those with baby booms need more low Quality Food, and those with high level players need more high Quality Food. Gifts and Houses have an international market that should not be underestimated, since the former is purchased often by Organizations, while the latter is purchased rarely in a citizen's life. The trade is more brisk in countries of size, while in some countries it seems like company managers log on as often as buyers do. Lastly, for Land, there are only three kinds of markets: the international low bid, the low bid in the country that has more valuable resources but protects this one from imports, and the low bid importer in a country that doesn't have the resource or that allows imports. You want to be able to compete in the first one, the second one is viable but more risky, and the third one is best reached by being the world's cheapest anyway. More on each industry in section three.
2c - Workforce
This is the most important factor in determining how profitable your company will be - your workers. On the whole, it is harder to outsmart other companies at selling than it is to find inefficiencies in the labor market. One of the chief inefficiencies of the labor market is that most people like to live where they've always lived, or in any case like to live where they like rather when where they are paid the most. This means that a Manufacture company or a Houses company can become the world's cheapest simply by finding a country that is among the world's cheapest for Manufacture labor or Construction labor. If they won't move to find better work, bring the work to them and profit.
Land resources are always a factor. Countries that have no high Land resources naturally tend to have a workforce where Manufacture and Construction are dominant. Two factors lead to them having cheaper labor. First, their citizens don't have any more needs than any other country (and often have less), so people buy no more things than anywhere else, but more of them are produced per citizen. This is a larger supply for a demand that is usually less. Second, they need to export goods in order to overcome the natural trade deficit in Land products, so they must be internationally competitive. When you are thinking about Land resouces themselves, the relative value of Oil, Iron, Grain, Wood, and Diamonds change over time. Usually a safe bet is to find a country that produces only one of them. The next safest bet is to find a country that produces only one of them and also the cheapest one (currently that one is Oil). The least safe (but potentially profitable) option is to invest in one of the most valuable resources of a country that has many. In general, you want the cheapest Land workforce possible for that Land product when starting a Land company, and having a country that can produce only that one resource as their best one gives you a long-term tendency to be competitive there. It is even sometimes possible to run a Land company in a country that has only Medium resources, to hire cheap and sell locally.
2d - Taxes
Sometimes a good idea becomes a bad one because of taxes. If the Income taxes in an industry are high, reconsider starting the company, as workers won't like having 50% of their wages taken from them. If you are starting a Houses company, pay attention to the VAT, because a low VAT of 1% means that you will have an easier time being competitive on the global market. If you're starting a Manufacture company, check to see if your industry has a much higher-than-usual VAT or a much lower-than-usual Import Tax, as either one can make your particular Manufacture company have a harder time competing with other Manufacture companies in the labor market, which are benefiting from a better tax situation for their industry.
2e - Competition
Existing competition is a real factor, especially when considering higher Quality companies and especially when considering to locate in smaller countries. Can you become the only provider for a certain Quality of Food or Quality of Houses? If so, it would be a good idea to do it, as even a temporary local monopoly is better than nothing.
Houses present a special case. There must always be a Q1 Houses company hiring in a given country in order for the whole industry to run smoothly because someone has to hire the skill 0 workers. If there is no government company doing this, make sure that some private companies are doing it before upgrading your own company.
2f - How do I find possible profit?
There are two ways, the rule of thumb value-per-production method and the company calculator. I will explain the rule of thumb method first, as it is illustrative. Start with a productivity calculator. Use the typical skill and typical wellness at which you will be hiring (for example, 4.3 skill and 80 wellness).
For a Land company, it is simple. You take the quantity they produce times the price of each product. Subtract wages, and you're done.
In a Manufacture or Houses company, these many units of production are require
1 (Multiplied by the Quality of the Company) - Food
2 (Multiplied by the Quality of the Company) - Gifts
5 (Multiplied by the Quality of the Company) - Weapons
10 (Multiplied by the Quality of the Company) - Moving Tickets
200 (Multiplied by the Quality of the Company) - Houses
First, divide the price you see by 1 + VAT/100 or just look at a company directly to get the price before taxes, which we'll call P. Let's call the number of units of production N, the quality Q, and the price of each raw material R. The value R should be in the same units (local currency) and be the price at which you buy it (convert from GOLD as necessary). Here, then, is your value-per-production:
P / (N * Q) - R = the value of each unit of Manufacture or Construction work
Both the productivity calculators and eRepublik itself will list the productivity of Manufacture and Construction workers in units of the Quality of the product they are producing, so that the same worker will show 10 units in a Q5 factory and 50 units in a Q1 factory. To normalize this, you can multiply that productivity by the Quality to get the real amount of work done, or you can use this formula instea
P / N - R * Q = the value of each unit of Manufacture or Construction work (times Quality)
After multiplying this number by the number of units of work (real units or those units as displayed by eRepublik, respectively), you can subtract the worker's wage to compute your profit for that worker.
Now that you've done it by hand, try a company calculator or create a spreadsheet if you're handy with them.
3. Industry
3a - Land
The most important decision you make for your Land company, after deciding what industry to be in and where to put it, is deciding what Quality it should be. There are five Qualities of Land company, and for higher Quality, there are higher starting costs and more wellness lost for your workers but also higher productivity.
Q1 - 1.0x - 100% of the quantity for units worth 1 each
Q2 - 1.8x - 90% of the quantity for units worth 2 each
Q3 - 2.4x - 80% of the quantity for units worth 3 each
Q4 - 2.8x - 70% of the quantity for units worth 4 each
Q5 - 3.0x - 60% of the quantity for units worth 5 each
Especially after the wellness changes, Q5 appears a very unlikely prospect, requiring more than twice the investment and giving very marginal gains while robbing employees of 1 more wellness daily. Even Q4 doesn't appear so attractive anymore, although it is viable for highly skilled workforces. The bulk of the raw materials are produced in Q2 and Q3 companies, with the latter tending to be more profitable than the former. The Q1 company is a special case due to the ways in which it is possible to use tricks of hiring and selling by which you can turn a profit that you honestly shouldn't (more on such techniques below). This doesn't mean that it is the best investment, only that it is possible to be profitable despite the metrics that say it shouldn't be.
3b - Food
The most important decision here, again, after choosing your country, is choosing the Quality. Every different Quality of Food in every country marketplace is important, as there is always a demand for that Quality of Food in particular for certain citizens, and this demand tends to be steady. Usually the Q1 market is overcrowded, but profits are often possible in every other Quality, and the business world is still trying to expand to meet the new demand for high Quality Food created by the wellness change. Positioning yourself in a Quality level that is less crowded (sometimes, but not always, higher) is a route to more profit.
3c - Weapons
Q1 Weapons are the most commonly sold by a large margin. While it is possible to sell Q2 Weapons, the price per Quality rarely increases and often goes down, so it is almost never worth it. The weapons of Q3 and Q4 do sell, but the weapons of Q5 sell more steadily than any other than Q1. Also, it is possible to sell directly, on the black market, to a client list of tanks as a producer of Q5 Weapons. While the world is currently experiencing a higher relative demand for products that improve wellness - Houses, Food, and Gifts - there will always be buyers of Weapons.
The demand for Weapons, unlike the demand for Food, is not steady but rather spikes during times of intense conflict and slumps when there is no training war. The demand for higher Quality Weapons is rarely there unless there is an important conflict. For this reason, it makes sense in this industry to withhold inventory for a better price if peace breaks out.
3d - Gifts
Q1 Gifts are the only type that make sense, economically. The higher Quality Gift will take the same number of resources and units of manufactor work per wellness restored, and the amount of wellness restored (10 per day) is the only restriction on Gifts. Not only does the higher Quality Gifts company take more GOLD to create, it also takes away more wellness from workers, which makes them more expensive, harder to hire, or both.
The demand for Gifts, like Food, is steady. Gifts are more likely than Food to be consumed in a country other than the one in which they are produced, which is good for starting such a company in a country with cheap Manufacture work and bad for starting one with expensive work.
3e - Moving Tickets
Q1 Moving Tickets by far make the most sense economically. The wellness saved (1 per Quality) on the higher Quality Moving Ticket is outweighed by the cost (10 production) when most people would simply rather go without or, instead, use a couple Gifts (at 4 production instead of 20 for the same effect).
The demand for Moving Tickets is by far the least steady. It spikes when there are elections approaching on the 25th for congress because they are the only elections in which region as well as country is important. It also spikes when regions are captured in which people have to move, and it will see high demand when people have to move out of countries for resistance wars and for fighting as mobile units.
3f - Houses
Houses of every Quality are needed, but Q1 Houses are the least needed, as there are so many of them produced already. Every other Quality can make sense, and like Food, it can be helpful to be one of the only companies of that Quality in a given country.
The demand for Houses is indeed steady, with decreasing sales during wartime and correspondingly increasing sales when there is less going on. The wellness change caused a huge spike in sales, and the resulting prices and wages present an oddity, as the labor force just hasn't been able to keep up with the demand. Houses are an extremely internationalized market, so making your company somewhere where there are low wages tends to be a good idea.
Don't run a Hospital or Defense System company unless, of course, you've got some compelling arrangement with a government to provide them. It is not really a private industry.
3g - What industry should I choose?
There's no one answer, but here's some ideas, depending on the Quality of company you can affor
Q1 - Gifts, Moving Tickets, Weapons
Q2 - Land, Food, Houses
Q3 - Land, Food, Houses
Q4 - Food, Houses
Q5 - Food, Houses, Weapons
If you want to think about upgrading, start your company at the appropriate quality (Q1 or Q2) and grow from there.
To make your choice, use all the information that you've seen here, combine that with information on the job market (how cheap labor is), the marketplace (how high prices are), and choose the most profitable company. This means, for example, that if you're starting a Q1 Manufacture company, you want to start the one that will have the highest value-per-production so that you can set wages in competition with the other Manucture companies but keep more for yourself. It also means that if you're in a highly internationalized industry (Houses or Gifts), you should be where the labor is cheap, and if you are in an industry with demand spikes (Weapons or Moving Tickets), you should be where the spikes in price occur and where the labor prices let you sell at a profit. You're in it to make money, right?
4. Hiring Basics
4a - Quantity VS Margin
There are two things you want to think about for every employee you have: what is my margin of profit for his work, and how much work is he doing? Or, rather, there is only one thing you want to think about: how much money is this employee making for me for his privilege of taking one of the work slots I paid for? The margin of profit for his work multiplies by how much work he is doing to compute this, your profit for that worker per day.
This means that a worker who doesn't make much but does it for beans, can be more profitable than a worker who makes a lot more stuff. It also means that a worker who makes a ton and gets paid a lot can be worth more to you because you have more absolute profit for the day's work.
4b - Quality of company
There are two distributions in the New World that are fairly similar:
Lots of new players, not as many old players.
Lots of low-Quality companies, not as many high-Quality companies.
The rule of thumb for Manufacture and Construction is that the older, higher-skilled players will want to work in the higher-Quality companies, as they have higher margins per product (due to being relatively underserved levels of Quality) and the company can reap more benefit from the fact that they do so much work. It also helps that these players tend to have a House or at least the means to support their wellness in the higher Quality company. Contrariwise, low Quality companies do better trying to find bargain workers among the new players.
Even though Raw Materials are entirely interchangeable regardless of the level of Quality (simply more or less of the same thing), the higher Quality Land companies offer more productivity, so much the same applies.
4c - Employee wellness
If someone at 100 wellness does a full day's work, someone at 85 wellness does 90% of a full day's work, someone at 55 wellness does 70% of a full day's work, and someone at 25 wellness does half a day's work. See the productivity formula.
Low wellness is the bane of every employer. Managing a workforce is largely managing the wellness of that workforce. Since there is no such thing as paying more for higher wellness or requiring higher wellness to be hired, most of your firing will be of players with low wellness.
Workers are becoming increasingly aware of the effect that the Quality of the companies in which they work has on their wellness and, more importantly, the real value of working at a lower Quality company. If you operate a Q1 company, your job offers need only beat every other Q1 company, not every other company. Likewise, for Q2 and above, either you want to beat every other job of the same Quality and lower Quality, or you want to provide an attractive alternative to a higher Quality job that offers savings in terms of making wellness easier to maintain.
4d - Max Productivity
Generally speaking, you always want this, and you want to be as little away from this as you can. Here's the penalty:
10 (you're fine), 9 or 11 (a 5% penalty), 8 or 12 (a 10% penalty), 7 or 13 (a 15% penalty), 6 or 14 (a 20% penalty), 5 or 15 (a 25% penalty).
This goes up to 20, where the penalty becomes 50%, the maximum penalty. For a Houses company, Maximum Productivity is at 20 employees, and these penalties are halved.
You may often find yourself hiring lower skill players than you usually would in order to make sure you maintain Max Productivity, as the lowest skills (and especially skill 0) tend to fill with workers the fastest.
5. Hiring is Half the Battle
5a - It's Okay to Be Evil
Firstly, eRepublik is almost an inversion of real life in any case, in terms of who does all the real-life work at a company. Each of the employees spend about 5 seconds a day looking at the page and clicking, making for less than a minute's work for the whole crew. Meanwhile, a company manager can easily spend 15-20 minutes or more managing just one company: scanning the employee lists, checking the job market offers, and frequently checking the marketplace offers and adjusting his prices. To think that a human being deserves no premium for 20 minutes of his day, while the people who are on autopilot deserve everything, is essentially exploitation of the person who spends that time and even invested the GOLD to be able to do it.
So do not feel bad about looking out for yourself. Moreover, do not feel bad about looking out for bargains in the job market. Consider it nothing other than recompense for the many employees who will happily join your company with 30 wellness, the closest thing to thievery authorized and unavoidable by the game mechanics.
5b - No, It's Not
At the same time, looking out for your employees can mean a lot. It tends to mean more in countries that have smaller labor markets. You see, each of your employees is a human being too. As you tick one of them off and they quit, they make a mental note to avoid you in the future if possible. Likewise, if you are kind to them, they are more likely to stick with you even if they may temporarily be able to get a nickel more somewhere else. And, of course, if you want to hire the people who check for the highest wage, you'll have to be the highest wage. One of the best ways to do that is to pay slightly more than the wage at which you hire, so that you're a little insulated from the fluctuation at the current prices.
5c - Papa Smurf Company
The Papa Smurf Company (no, I'm not sure how I made that up) tries to make personal contact with each person they hire and educate them about the game. It tries to make sure that they understand the importance of wellness. It may offer those with low wellness the ability to take a reduced pay in exchange for Food and Gifts. It may also make such gifting arrangements on a regular basis with employees of any wellness. The theme here is that the company manager is an active one. By being active, the company manager can win loyalty from the workers, which means that they are less likely to be scanning the job market and looking to leave. That not only means that you keep a good employee but that you don't have to look for another one. Turnover gives an immediate hit to your Max Productivity, and you may go through several bad employees in the meantime. The idea of a Papa Smurf Company is to make good employees where others won't bother.
5d - Me and My Home Boys
This is how you can get all the benefits of a Papa Smurf Company without having to do all the hand-holding and bribery. Simply round up as many friends as you can, put them in your company, and pay them fairly. This is also how a cooperative hires; it just goes the extra step of joint ownership and shared profit.
If you don't have 9 friends, you can always make use of a few "zombies" for less hassle and to maintain Max Productivity. These are workers who eventually stop showing up. They will show "X" for every day of the week because they don't work.
5e - Just Fishing
This might be the most profitable way to operate without being as personable as required by the previous strategy. Just keep looking on the job market for "good deals," even when you are at full employment. The difference between a very profitable company and an unprofitable one is that the very profitable company will adjust job market offers every day, even several times a day, to be able to get the most out of every job slot. Whenever you get some extra employees, fire the least profitable ones, in a constant refinement.
Somebody using this strategy should not worry too much about making raises, either. Getting a hire that doesn't realize when they've jumped a skill bracket or when the wage market heats up is a good deal that got better.
5f - Too Rich for My Blood
Sometimes the job offers get very hot. This often happens when one or more people open up a new company at the same time. This is when you're going to have to do some damage control. Stop bidding in the skill brackets in which you primarily hire, for one thing, as you're going to end up driving your employees over to the dark side with the competition. If you already have sufficient workers, the focus is on keeping them and keeping max productivity. It can be useful to make one big raise to all the workers, to a wage that is higher than the current increase, so as to exceed the job offers on market by a comfortable margin. Why exceed them? Because people are often motivated to check competing offers after they've gotten a raise (yes, perhaps even more likely than if they didn't). The idea is that you want to make sure that they know they are benefiting from the wage hike, but you don't want to adjust job offers daily and you definitely don't want your workers checking the job offers daily if they are "hot" at the time. This may also be a good time to become more active (see "Papa Smurf Company"
You can also fire the entire workforce, temporarily, if most of them have already quit. This will release some workers to find other jobs, allowing the wage market to normalize more quickly, and it will also allow your company to sell at the higher prices on the marketplace the products that were made with less expensive labor (assuming that you use stockpiling).
5g - Rotating Door Company
Historically used during times of occupation when the number of companies have been dramatically reduced but also used by high-Quality companies to avoid the start-up costs of making a second factory, the "Rotating Door Company" allows players to work one day at a time. The manager places job offers far in excess of what he can employ at Max Productivity and continuously fires workers as they arrive so as to stay close to the Max Productivity required for efficiency.
A variation on this theme involves shifts, where 10 different players congregate into a Manufacture company, and when they've all arrived, they work. When they've all worked, they are fired, and the second shift files in. This is only possible with communication and scheduling permitted, for example, in a militia.
6. Skill Level Lore
6a - Newbies are good employees
Skill 0 jobs are very interesting, for several reasons. Here are some of them.
When you first start the game, the only kind of job you can get is a skill 0 job.
When you want to change your profession, the only kind of job you can get is a skill 0 job.
When the game tells you to find a job, the job list you are given is for skill 0 jobs.
This last reason is why you can sometimes hire players of skill 1, 2, 3 or even higher with your skill 0 job offers, even when there are more competitive job offers at the higher skill levels. The second reason is why you can sometimes hire players who are experienced at the game and maintain their wellness well (or, for that matter, have really low wellness) and want your skill 0 job. The first reason, however, is the most interesting.
It is for the first reason that skill 0 jobs fill the fastest. If you ever need to fill out your company to get Max Productivity, the quickest way to do it is with a skill 0 job offer. It is sometimes for this reason that even high Quality companies, to the chagrin of people who help new players, place their job offers here.
It is also for this reason that these employees are some of the most likely to be with your company for the rest of their lives. It is not completely uncommon to get employees that will click their way through your company for 30 days or more, even at close to minimum wage. If you fish long enough in the newbie pond, who knows what you might drag up?
Skill 0 jobs got even more interesting now that all players start at 100 wellness. That's a lot better than most new hires.
A large number of your skill 0 employees will work once or not at all. They were simply unimpressed with the game and will become zombies. A large number of your skill 0 employees will disappear completely when they hit levels 6, 7, or 8 and never return. They are, more often than not, multis that you should fire unless you want the zombie.
6b - 1 is the Loneliest Number
It takes 3 days to be able to quit a job, it takes 2 days to hit skill 1, it takes 6 days to hit skill 2, and it usually takes longer to realize you might want to quit your first job. For these reasons, skill 1 jobs are sometimes filled but are rarely worth the time.
Despite being much much slower than skill 0 hires, skill 1 hires are often faster than skill 5 and higher hires. If you want Max Productivity without angering those who believe they control skill 0 jobs, try looking at skills 1 and 2. Many countries encourage only Q1 companies to post skill 0 jobs, in order to make maintenance of the health of new players easier.
6c - 2 is as bad as 1
Well, not completely, but some things make this tend to be so. Even though people will spend ten days at skill 2, many government skill 0 job centers refuse to release their workers to the wild until their sixteenth day of work, at skill 3, much to the detriment of their economies. At the same time, some people still don't realize that they can get a higher paying job, or at least a higher pay job that's still at Q1 (there is some confusion here because those job offers may be on a subsquent page). So it takes them a while to become competitive.
6d - Skill 3 is Key
It is by this time, 16 days of work, that most players have either figured out that they can change jobs or have been fired from their government job. If you have a Q1 or Q2 company and you want to look for bargains or run a Papa Smurf Company, this is a good place to focus. People will spend only 20 days at skill 3, which means that you should be attentive for those who level to skill 4, if you are the kind who gives payraises to keep them.
6e - Skill 4 is Magic
This is where most companies find their bread and butter. After speeding through the first four brackets in just 36 days, workers begin the long 50 day march through the fourth level of skill. This means that a huge number of workers at any given time are either entering this skill bracket, getting fired, or jumping jobs. It also means that they are slightly more clued in, on average, than the people who are in their first month of play. It is not unusual to run a company consisting entirely of skill 4 workers.
6f - Skill 5 to 6 for Kicks
This is where you look for bargains against skill 4, or where you look for supplementary workers against a company that likes to higher skill 7+, where a bargain of course is measured not by the margin but in the margin times the productivity. The hires are much less frequent but still do occur.
6g - Skill 7 for Fun and Profit
The "fun" part of this is that those newly minted skill 7 workers are in the same labor pool with skill 8, skill 9, skill 10, skill 11, skill 12, skill 13, skill 14, and skill 15. What does this mean? It means that it's time to go fishing! The prices for work in skill 7 are higher than the value of an actual skill 7 worker, because the job fishers are always out there, throwing away the guppies and hoping for the "big one." You can sometimes keep someone with 8 or 9 skill and can usually give a raise in hopes to keep someone with 10 or more skill, but you can generally not afford to keep the skill 7 player at the wage at which they were hired.
7. Sales
7a - Watching your industry
This is really the fundamental thing. Once your labor costs are under control, the only real way to increase profits is to increase revenues. (Raw Materials costs can be improved only by stockpiling when prices are low, once you start buying them at the world market prices.) Watch your marketplace, watch the behavior of other companies, watch the pattern of consumers. Note the time of day most people tend to log on and buy their things, whether that's Food, Weapons, or something else. Just keep a general idea in mind of what prices seem to be low and which seem to be high for that industry in the country you sell in. This will help you answer the next two questions.
7b - To stockpile or not to stockpile?
Stockpiling can be a viable strategy in any industry, except, for most of history, in Houses. The way it works as a strategy is different for different industries.
Land - There is only one factor that puts an offer at the front of a list of offers of Raw Materials at the same price, and that factor is quantity. The highest possible quantity that you can list is 999, and most companies list less. By stockpiling a reserve of about a thousand raw materials, you can list your raw materials in great quantity at a price slightly above the current price (but still a price that occasionally comes to the front). This way, you sell whenever the fluctuation is in your favor.
Weapons - Prices always go up when there is serious conflict. It will take weeks or even months for your one little company to be able to produce all the Weapons that will be used on the day of that big battle. So why not sell all of them at that time? If you have the reserves of cash to wait, go for it. When an intense battle spurs on high prices, your offers will be there to meet the increased demand.
Moving Tickets - Prices will usually go up in the weeks preceding a congressional elections. That's a given that you can count on as the 25th approaches. They also spike whenever there is a lot of people wanting to move out of the country. Having a lot of tickets to sell at these times is better than selling them when they are cheaper.
Food and Gifts - even though the demand is relatively steady, the behavior of other companies is not, and there will sometimes be shifts in price that are significant. Be ready to sell more when they swing up.
7c - To undercut or not to undercut?
In Land, it can often be very helpful to take a peek over at the neighboring Qualities. If your Quality is unusually high for some reason, when measured per Quality, you can undercut everyone else in the Quality that you inhabit in order to take advantage of that. Otherwise, if your Quality is already among the cheapest, price matching is usually best, combined with listing higher Quantity in order to come to the front of the list.
It is often useful in the industries of Food, Weapons, or Gifts to use a "price match" strategy that puts you at the same price as the lowest competitor. In the case of Food particularly, where people tend to buy one at a time, it is helpful to "quantity match" also. Very often this will make an implicit offer to the other company manager online to sell both of your stocks of Food at this price, instead of trying to cut the other out of the market. This is mostly possible because nobody wants to spend literally every waking hour managing their Food prices.
If the lowest priced offer is for a small quantity, it can be useful to place your offer higher, and wait for it to sell out. At the same time, this can instead be used as a psychological trick against other companies, especially in a slow moving industry such as Tickets. Instead of listing all of your stock, list something like 7 of it, and refresh it throughout the day as Tickets are sold. You may find people less eager to underbid you.
In Houses, if you are not selling your inventory, you should take a look at the global marketplace instead of the local one and bid aggressively enough to get people to move to your country's marketplace in order to buy from you.
7d - To export?
Firstly, if you are not producing in a country that consistently has some of the cheapest Manufacture or Constructions labor in the world, you don't even really have to consider this as an option, because it isn't one. If the company isn't profitable enough, you should exit the business and open another one where the labor is cheap, if you want to export.
Secondly, if you are managing a Land company and have never considered exporting, you should. Buying an export license is pretty much the only way to escape the stiff competition of the international marketplace and make a little more money. The information in Export Markets for Every Industry is still only a week old and can help you start your search.
To reiterate some of the words of warning there: An export license, at 20 GOLD, can take time to recover the investment. Make sure that the improvement over the local market is sufficient to be worth it. Make sure that the volume of purchases may also be sufficient to be worth it. Check the history of tax changes in the country and the general attitude of protectionism or free trade.
One neat thing about Q1 Land, as hinted before, is that you can price it more than it's worth. Newbie company managers will buy it because they think they need the corresponding Quality RM or because they don't understand how higher Quality RM's work, or just because it shows up first on the list. This means, for example, that Q1 Iron sells pretty well at this time in Poland, Indonesia, Canada, and the United Kingdom; you can often even get more with an export license for your Q1 RM company than you can with an upgrade to Q2, still selling domestically. That export license will also stay with you if you eventually do upgrade.
8. Moneychanging
8a - Buying currency
Okay, so you can go to the Monetary Market, and it will show you a list of currency you can buy, all at the same price in GOLD. Don't do that. Don't ever do that. Not in a million years. Not if your house is on fire. Why? You are in business, so you should always be looking to make more money, and that means always looking to get things cheaper. Also, it's too easy to buy currency cheaper to neglect to do it.
To do it, flip the offers around, so that you "BUY" the currency and "SELL" your GOLD. Enter an amount of GOLD you want to sell, such as 2 GOLD maybe. Then enter the amount of currency you want to get for each GOLD. You need to be at the top of the list to sell, and that means accepting less currency for each GOLD.
Any of the usual advice about watching trends to buy when it's cheap, or not undercutting when the offers below you are small, will apply here. A good tool to use is the ereptools.net Exchange Rates list, which will let you see at a glance when various currencies are showing a larger "spread" between the two sides of the monetary market: selling GOLD (when buying currency) and the "consumer option" (selling currency for their GOLD).
8b - Selling currency
Here, you get yourself onto the front page, where all the offers of currency for GOLD are. It may seem impossible because, when you list your currency, you are put at the back of the list. But one simple trick (valid even for the small time trader) will let you do so with ease.
Every offer of currency expires after approximately 5 days. Thus, you should place your offers of currency twice or three times a day, perhaps especially when the volume of purchasing is high. You can place as little as a penny and charge as much GOLD as you want, then change it later to something appropriate. It helps to have a system of numbering so that you know what the oldest offer is, so that you can change it later. This can be achieved simply by incrementing. So, your Monetary page might look something like this:
(Most people use whole numbers. This example has decimals because these currencies are being traded more often.)
This method takes practice and patience, but once mastered, like most things, it's easy.
8c - Wait, why don't I just make money with this?
Some people do. You can also use it to cut out these middle men. Or, you can become one of them, especially in the period of time in which you are saving up to buy your first company.
Why would you want to sell currency? Obviously, to get GOLD, both to buy the Raw Materials you may need in other types of currency and to build your GOLD reserves. Again, you're in it to make money, right?
And why would you want to buy it? Mostly, to buy raw materials, but also to buy the initial wages for workers or to run a strictly-export business and buy wages on a regular basis.
You can also use the Monetary Market to avoid paying Income tax when withdrawing money from your company. Instead of using the Finance page, you list an offer of 0.01 GOLD with your Organization. For example, if you want to withdraw 199 currency, list an offer of 0.01 GOLD for 19900 currency. Then wait a minute, go back to the monetary market, and use the drop-down box to switch to using your company instead of your Organization. Find your offer of GOLD for currency and buy the hundredth of a GOLD. By taking this exchange, you move the currency into your Organization without paying the Income tax that you would pay if withdrawing it on the Finance page. The same basic method can be used to pull out GOLD by selling a bit of currency (or to pull out one currency by selling a penny of another).
9. Raw Materials
9a - Understanding Quality
Two Q1 Raw Materials are no better or worse than a Q2 raw material. When you buy a Q2 raw material, 2 units are added to your RM stores, and when you buy a Q3 raw material, 3 units are added. This is the same no matter what the Quality of your own company is. I think we understand this. To find the price of the units of Raw Material purchased, divide the price you see by the Quality of what you are purchasing. Or, even better, let a script like eRepublik Plus (for Greasemonkey) do this for you.
9b - Finding cheap Raw Materials
You can do this pretty easily with the ereptools.net page but don't neglect to pay attention to the fact that currencies with bigger spreads can also give you cheaper Raw Materials, as the actual price is lower than listed.
If you have only one Organization (or even if you have only two), you're going to have to place them strategically in order to get the good deals on a consistent basis without using Moving Tickets. Pay attention to prices over several days and put your Organization in a good place for prices on most days. Your company doesn't have to be in the same country as the Organization; indeed, this is often one of the least useful places for the Organization to be.
9c - Donating cheap Raw Materials
And here is where I pay for your time in reading this article in just one link. Download Autodonater for eRepublik by alexc and use it with Greasemonkey for Firefox. All you do is buy 20 raw materials on the Organization, open another tab with your company to "
10. Exit, Upgrade, Expand?
10a - Exit
One mistake that even veterans make is never considering to sell their company and exit the business. Indeed, you should probably be revisiting the fundamental factors of the market you are in and the profitability of your company at least once a month. If your company isn't profitable enough to justify the capital invested in its creation, it's time to list it on the company market and make it somebody else's problem. If you do continue to operate it while it's for sale, make sure not to keep lots of RM or currency on hand, as you don't tend to be compensated enough for it.
10b - Upgrade
The upgrade is not always strictly worth it in terms of the money you make for the GOLD invested. Four Q1 companies can often out-profit one Q3 company. The problem is, when you have enough GOLD to start a Q3 company, you are probably tired of the micromanagement required for a Q1 company, let alone required to run four of them at the same time. Saving yourself some RL time is the real benefit of upgrading up in Quality rather than expanding out in quantity of companies. The other benefit, of course, is that these companies are just more profitable. Fewer people have enough GOLD to make a Q4 or Q5 (to a lesser extent, Q3), and almost all of them are intent on making a profit.
Make sure that all your products are sold before you upgrade: as the warning box will say, everything on the market, in production, or in stock will disappear. This also means that it's good to wait until you start on a new House before upgrading. The currency, raw materials, and of course workers stay with the company when you upgrade.
10c - Expand
If you do choose to increase the quantity of companies you hold, there are several ways to do it. One thing that some investors are attracted to doing is to own the "supply chain" of their finished goods company by having the Raw Materials company also. This is not really good business sense in and of itself, because it's always better to have a more profitable company (if there is one) and buy the Raw Materials from someone else. However, there is a strategy of so-called "vertical integration" if your Manufacture or Construction company is in the same country as your Land company. That strategy is to buy other people's Raw Materials cheaper so that your price becomes the best offer. This idea doesn't work that well if the market is too large to influence much.
v2 is coming, v2 is coming!
You have heard many times that you should wait for v2 before opening a business. Smile and nod, smile and nod. Open a business as soon as you can and profit off the fools who think they are being prudent, creating less competition in the marketplace that has gotten a new jolt of life from the wellness changes that have increased the consumption dramatically for a huge chunk of the economy (Houses, Food, and Gifts).
Food and Houses are already good and are getting better because they will be differentiated not only by Quality (and they are already the most differentiated products by Quality) but also by the allocation of "Customization Points" within each Quality. You might actually find a niche in v2, and you will find plenty of opportunity in the weeks and months before the new economic module is launched.
And why not list it for a premium price at "Companies for Sale" in that first week of v2 when the GOLD come rushing in? Quite a good exit strategy!
Are we there yet?
Well, this article is finished, but it is by no means complete. It's just what came to mind when I sat down and started writing. Feel free to offer your own words of wisdom or comments on it.
Here are some of my past articles of interest to the company owner:
* Business Opportunities in 27 Countries
* Finding and Funding your New Business Plan
* Home Economics: Making Money
* Home Economics: Saving Money
* Business Opportunities in 27 Countries #2 (still useful for showing how research is done)
And here are some more:
* The Economy: Past, Present, and Future (the future is now)
* How I Made 7 GOLD Overnight and You Can Too (maybe...)
* Graduate to Become a Two-Dozen Clicker (has more pics than this guide)
* Best Jobs in the New World (relatively recent wage data)
* Export Markets for Every Industry (also recent data)
Bon appetit.
1. Starting capital
1a - Self-funded
1b - Partners
1c - Cooperatives
1d - How much do I need?
2. Research
2a - Country
2b - Demand
2c - Workforce
2d - Taxes
2e - Competition
2f - How do I find possible profit?
3. Industry
3a - Land
3b - Food
3c - Weapons
3d - Gifts
3e - Moving Tickets
3f - Houses
3g - What industry should I choose?
4. Hiring Basics
4a - Quantity VS Margin
4b - Quality of company
4c - Employee wellness
4d - Max Productivity
5. Hiring is Half the Battle
5a - It's Okay to Be Evil
5b - No, It's Not
5c - Papa Smurf Company
5d - Me and My Home Boys
5e - Just Fishing
5f - Too Rich for My Blood
5g - Rotating Door Company
6. Skill Level Lore
6a - Newbies are good employees
6b - 1 is the Loneliest Number
6c - 2 is as bad as 1
6d - Skill 3 is Key
6e - Skill 4 is Magic
6f - Skill 5 to 6 for Kicks
6g - Skill 7 for Fun and Profit
7. Sales
7a - Watching your industry
7b - To stockpile or not to stockpile?
7c - To undercut or not to undercut?
7d - To export?
8. Moneychanging
8a - Buying currency
8b - Selling currency
8c - Wait, why don't I just make money with this?
9. Raw Materials
9a - Understanding Quality
9b - Finding cheap Raw Materials
9c - Donating cheap Raw Materials
10. Exit, Upgrade, Expand?
10a - Exit
10b - Upgrade
10c - Expand
1. Starting Capital
1a - Self-funded
If you want the least hassle and to keep the rewards (and risks) to yourself, you will fund your company yourself. Citizens create all the GOLD in eRepublik. They do so by paying with a credit card or PayPal, by using incentivized offers, or by obtaining a treasure map for any of these reasons:
Getting a medal. For most people, this means Hard Worker or Super Soldier, but all of them have the same reward.
Leveling up to 6 or at every level from 16 and after.
Referring a friend who makes it to level 6.
You can also exchange your currency into GOLD using the monetary market (see "Moneychanging" below). Using only these methods, it may take three months or more until you have the capital you need. But it will be all yours, and you won't need to use PayPal.
1b - Partners
The types of arrangements that can be made vary. Here are just some of them:
You work as a manager of a company for someone who doesn't have the time.
You and your best friend each put in half the GOLD and take half the profit, sharing responsibilities over running the company.
Your friend loans you half the GOLD, and you promise to pay back a certain amount each month.
You talk to a banking organization and present your business plan. You get a loan and pay it back.
You and two friends each put in a certain amount, while you run it and pay dividends to your friends.
Keep your ear to the ground and ask around if you want to go into a partnership.
1c - Cooperatives
These can be grassroots, with 10 players who come together and each contribute the same amount and agree on their terms. They can also be institutional, with a controlling Organization requiring dues up front to work at the cooperative. Cooperatives scale very well for Q1 and Q2 because the cost of each worker slot is only 2 or 4 GOLD. They face scaling issues as they approach Q4 and Q5, where the investment of each worker would need to be 19 GOLD or 39 GOLD in a Manufacture company, which is not to say it couldn't be done but only that it is not as common. You can often find cooperatives associated with leftist political parties, but it isn't a requirement. There are indeed real competitive advantages to a company that knows who its workers are and where the worker knows that higher production means a higher salary. Other than observations on hiring, most comments here apply to cooperatives.
1d - How much do I need?
The first thing needed is an Organization. If you haven't got one, create it with 5 GOLD. For now you can use that to store items and to buy things cheaply. Your company should be held on the Organization, even though the game gives you the option to run a company on your citizen, cost yourself wellness, fail to advance in your job skill, and fail to earn Hard Worker. After you have the organization (that 5 GOLD is not computed into the following), you would need the following amounts to create a company out of nothing:
Q1 = 20 GOLD
Q2 = 40 GOLD
Q3 = 90 GOLD
Q4 = 190 GOLD
Q5 = 390 GOLD
If there are any companies of that Quality and in an appropriate region (important for Land!) that are these prices or lower, you should always buy them from "Companies for Sale" rather than creating them. You can consider the value of the stock and RM into the value of the company, but you should also consider that these values may change, so make sure it is indeed a bargain. You usually shouldn't pay more than 10 GOLD per export license and only if they are ones you'd want anyway. You should never pay more than 20 GOLD extra, no matter how many export licenses there are, because you will usually be better off buying the one export license that will be best today than you would be having lots of mediocre ones. Export licenses that are inactive or may easily become inactive are of no value. For more on export licenses, see 7d, "To export?"
You don't just need the company, however. You want enough raw materials and salaries to last about a week (at least three or four days), as you start recruiting employees and trying to make your company efficient and turn a profit. This means, roughly:
Q1 = 6 GOLD (about 10 GOLD for Houses)
Q2 = 8 GOLD (about 15 GOLD for Houses)
Q3 = 10 GOLD (about 30 GOLD for Houses)
Q4 = 15 GOLD (about 50 GOLD for Houses)
Q5 = 20 GOLD (about 60 GOLD for Houses)
These are just rough estimates and assume that you may not sell your first House made right away. Moreover, several advanced strategies for selling, which require stockpiling, require that you have more capital than listed above.
2 - Research
2a - Country
You should know a lot about the country in which you invest. You must browse the press a little to know the most common language(s) spoken, you must review its military history to determine what possible gains or losses of regions may occur, you must look at the Economy page to see all taxes and at the Administration page to look for recent tax changes. You must know whether there is a significant mature playerbase and also whether there have been any recent baby booms, to understand what kind of market and workers you can expect. You must know roughly how many active players there are and whether there are already way too many companies relative to the number of players. You absolutely must know which High Land resources are in the country and where they are. The more you know, the better it is for you when deciding how to invest.
2b - Demand
Countries that have expanded into empires or that have lots of Mutual Protection Pacts get into more wars and therefore sell more Weapons. This is a fundamental factor that should not be underestimated for the sale of Weapons. Countries that have a highly active political scene are more likely to sell more Tickets for congressional elections. Every country needs Food, those with baby booms need more low Quality Food, and those with high level players need more high Quality Food. Gifts and Houses have an international market that should not be underestimated, since the former is purchased often by Organizations, while the latter is purchased rarely in a citizen's life. The trade is more brisk in countries of size, while in some countries it seems like company managers log on as often as buyers do. Lastly, for Land, there are only three kinds of markets: the international low bid, the low bid in the country that has more valuable resources but protects this one from imports, and the low bid importer in a country that doesn't have the resource or that allows imports. You want to be able to compete in the first one, the second one is viable but more risky, and the third one is best reached by being the world's cheapest anyway. More on each industry in section three.
2c - Workforce
This is the most important factor in determining how profitable your company will be - your workers. On the whole, it is harder to outsmart other companies at selling than it is to find inefficiencies in the labor market. One of the chief inefficiencies of the labor market is that most people like to live where they've always lived, or in any case like to live where they like rather when where they are paid the most. This means that a Manufacture company or a Houses company can become the world's cheapest simply by finding a country that is among the world's cheapest for Manufacture labor or Construction labor. If they won't move to find better work, bring the work to them and profit.
Land resources are always a factor. Countries that have no high Land resources naturally tend to have a workforce where Manufacture and Construction are dominant. Two factors lead to them having cheaper labor. First, their citizens don't have any more needs than any other country (and often have less), so people buy no more things than anywhere else, but more of them are produced per citizen. This is a larger supply for a demand that is usually less. Second, they need to export goods in order to overcome the natural trade deficit in Land products, so they must be internationally competitive. When you are thinking about Land resouces themselves, the relative value of Oil, Iron, Grain, Wood, and Diamonds change over time. Usually a safe bet is to find a country that produces only one of them. The next safest bet is to find a country that produces only one of them and also the cheapest one (currently that one is Oil). The least safe (but potentially profitable) option is to invest in one of the most valuable resources of a country that has many. In general, you want the cheapest Land workforce possible for that Land product when starting a Land company, and having a country that can produce only that one resource as their best one gives you a long-term tendency to be competitive there. It is even sometimes possible to run a Land company in a country that has only Medium resources, to hire cheap and sell locally.
2d - Taxes
Sometimes a good idea becomes a bad one because of taxes. If the Income taxes in an industry are high, reconsider starting the company, as workers won't like having 50% of their wages taken from them. If you are starting a Houses company, pay attention to the VAT, because a low VAT of 1% means that you will have an easier time being competitive on the global market. If you're starting a Manufacture company, check to see if your industry has a much higher-than-usual VAT or a much lower-than-usual Import Tax, as either one can make your particular Manufacture company have a harder time competing with other Manufacture companies in the labor market, which are benefiting from a better tax situation for their industry.
2e - Competition
Existing competition is a real factor, especially when considering higher Quality companies and especially when considering to locate in smaller countries. Can you become the only provider for a certain Quality of Food or Quality of Houses? If so, it would be a good idea to do it, as even a temporary local monopoly is better than nothing.
Houses present a special case. There must always be a Q1 Houses company hiring in a given country in order for the whole industry to run smoothly because someone has to hire the skill 0 workers. If there is no government company doing this, make sure that some private companies are doing it before upgrading your own company.
2f - How do I find possible profit?
There are two ways, the rule of thumb value-per-production method and the company calculator. I will explain the rule of thumb method first, as it is illustrative. Start with a productivity calculator. Use the typical skill and typical wellness at which you will be hiring (for example, 4.3 skill and 80 wellness).
For a Land company, it is simple. You take the quantity they produce times the price of each product. Subtract wages, and you're done.
In a Manufacture or Houses company, these many units of production are require
😛
1 (Multiplied by the Quality of the Company) - Food
2 (Multiplied by the Quality of the Company) - Gifts
5 (Multiplied by the Quality of the Company) - Weapons
10 (Multiplied by the Quality of the Company) - Moving Tickets
200 (Multiplied by the Quality of the Company) - Houses
First, divide the price you see by 1 + VAT/100 or just look at a company directly to get the price before taxes, which we'll call P. Let's call the number of units of production N, the quality Q, and the price of each raw material R. The value R should be in the same units (local currency) and be the price at which you buy it (convert from GOLD as necessary). Here, then, is your value-per-production:
P / (N * Q) - R = the value of each unit of Manufacture or Construction work
Both the productivity calculators and eRepublik itself will list the productivity of Manufacture and Construction workers in units of the Quality of the product they are producing, so that the same worker will show 10 units in a Q5 factory and 50 units in a Q1 factory. To normalize this, you can multiply that productivity by the Quality to get the real amount of work done, or you can use this formula instea
😛
P / N - R * Q = the value of each unit of Manufacture or Construction work (times Quality)
After multiplying this number by the number of units of work (real units or those units as displayed by eRepublik, respectively), you can subtract the worker's wage to compute your profit for that worker.
Now that you've done it by hand, try a company calculator or create a spreadsheet if you're handy with them.
3. Industry
3a - Land
The most important decision you make for your Land company, after deciding what industry to be in and where to put it, is deciding what Quality it should be. There are five Qualities of Land company, and for higher Quality, there are higher starting costs and more wellness lost for your workers but also higher productivity.
Q1 - 1.0x - 100% of the quantity for units worth 1 each
Q2 - 1.8x - 90% of the quantity for units worth 2 each
Q3 - 2.4x - 80% of the quantity for units worth 3 each
Q4 - 2.8x - 70% of the quantity for units worth 4 each
Q5 - 3.0x - 60% of the quantity for units worth 5 each
Especially after the wellness changes, Q5 appears a very unlikely prospect, requiring more than twice the investment and giving very marginal gains while robbing employees of 1 more wellness daily. Even Q4 doesn't appear so attractive anymore, although it is viable for highly skilled workforces. The bulk of the raw materials are produced in Q2 and Q3 companies, with the latter tending to be more profitable than the former. The Q1 company is a special case due to the ways in which it is possible to use tricks of hiring and selling by which you can turn a profit that you honestly shouldn't (more on such techniques below). This doesn't mean that it is the best investment, only that it is possible to be profitable despite the metrics that say it shouldn't be.
3b - Food
The most important decision here, again, after choosing your country, is choosing the Quality. Every different Quality of Food in every country marketplace is important, as there is always a demand for that Quality of Food in particular for certain citizens, and this demand tends to be steady. Usually the Q1 market is overcrowded, but profits are often possible in every other Quality, and the business world is still trying to expand to meet the new demand for high Quality Food created by the wellness change. Positioning yourself in a Quality level that is less crowded (sometimes, but not always, higher) is a route to more profit.
3c - Weapons
Q1 Weapons are the most commonly sold by a large margin. While it is possible to sell Q2 Weapons, the price per Quality rarely increases and often goes down, so it is almost never worth it. The weapons of Q3 and Q4 do sell, but the weapons of Q5 sell more steadily than any other than Q1. Also, it is possible to sell directly, on the black market, to a client list of tanks as a producer of Q5 Weapons. While the world is currently experiencing a higher relative demand for products that improve wellness - Houses, Food, and Gifts - there will always be buyers of Weapons.
The demand for Weapons, unlike the demand for Food, is not steady but rather spikes during times of intense conflict and slumps when there is no training war. The demand for higher Quality Weapons is rarely there unless there is an important conflict. For this reason, it makes sense in this industry to withhold inventory for a better price if peace breaks out.
3d - Gifts
Q1 Gifts are the only type that make sense, economically. The higher Quality Gift will take the same number of resources and units of manufactor work per wellness restored, and the amount of wellness restored (10 per day) is the only restriction on Gifts. Not only does the higher Quality Gifts company take more GOLD to create, it also takes away more wellness from workers, which makes them more expensive, harder to hire, or both.
The demand for Gifts, like Food, is steady. Gifts are more likely than Food to be consumed in a country other than the one in which they are produced, which is good for starting such a company in a country with cheap Manufacture work and bad for starting one with expensive work.
3e - Moving Tickets
Q1 Moving Tickets by far make the most sense economically. The wellness saved (1 per Quality) on the higher Quality Moving Ticket is outweighed by the cost (10 production) when most people would simply rather go without or, instead, use a couple Gifts (at 4 production instead of 20 for the same effect).
The demand for Moving Tickets is by far the least steady. It spikes when there are elections approaching on the 25th for congress because they are the only elections in which region as well as country is important. It also spikes when regions are captured in which people have to move, and it will see high demand when people have to move out of countries for resistance wars and for fighting as mobile units.
3f - Houses
Houses of every Quality are needed, but Q1 Houses are the least needed, as there are so many of them produced already. Every other Quality can make sense, and like Food, it can be helpful to be one of the only companies of that Quality in a given country.
The demand for Houses is indeed steady, with decreasing sales during wartime and correspondingly increasing sales when there is less going on. The wellness change caused a huge spike in sales, and the resulting prices and wages present an oddity, as the labor force just hasn't been able to keep up with the demand. Houses are an extremely internationalized market, so making your company somewhere where there are low wages tends to be a good idea.
Don't run a Hospital or Defense System company unless, of course, you've got some compelling arrangement with a government to provide them. It is not really a private industry.
3g - What industry should I choose?
There's no one answer, but here's some ideas, depending on the Quality of company you can affor
😛
Q1 - Gifts, Moving Tickets, Weapons
Q2 - Land, Food, Houses
Q3 - Land, Food, Houses
Q4 - Food, Houses
Q5 - Food, Houses, Weapons
If you want to think about upgrading, start your company at the appropriate quality (Q1 or Q2) and grow from there.
To make your choice, use all the information that you've seen here, combine that with information on the job market (how cheap labor is), the marketplace (how high prices are), and choose the most profitable company. This means, for example, that if you're starting a Q1 Manufacture company, you want to start the one that will have the highest value-per-production so that you can set wages in competition with the other Manucture companies but keep more for yourself. It also means that if you're in a highly internationalized industry (Houses or Gifts), you should be where the labor is cheap, and if you are in an industry with demand spikes (Weapons or Moving Tickets), you should be where the spikes in price occur and where the labor prices let you sell at a profit. You're in it to make money, right?
4. Hiring Basics
4a - Quantity VS Margin
There are two things you want to think about for every employee you have: what is my margin of profit for his work, and how much work is he doing? Or, rather, there is only one thing you want to think about: how much money is this employee making for me for his privilege of taking one of the work slots I paid for? The margin of profit for his work multiplies by how much work he is doing to compute this, your profit for that worker per day.
This means that a worker who doesn't make much but does it for beans, can be more profitable than a worker who makes a lot more stuff. It also means that a worker who makes a ton and gets paid a lot can be worth more to you because you have more absolute profit for the day's work.
4b - Quality of company
There are two distributions in the New World that are fairly similar:
Lots of new players, not as many old players.
Lots of low-Quality companies, not as many high-Quality companies.
The rule of thumb for Manufacture and Construction is that the older, higher-skilled players will want to work in the higher-Quality companies, as they have higher margins per product (due to being relatively underserved levels of Quality) and the company can reap more benefit from the fact that they do so much work. It also helps that these players tend to have a House or at least the means to support their wellness in the higher Quality company. Contrariwise, low Quality companies do better trying to find bargain workers among the new players.
Even though Raw Materials are entirely interchangeable regardless of the level of Quality (simply more or less of the same thing), the higher Quality Land companies offer more productivity, so much the same applies.
4c - Employee wellness
If someone at 100 wellness does a full day's work, someone at 85 wellness does 90% of a full day's work, someone at 55 wellness does 70% of a full day's work, and someone at 25 wellness does half a day's work. See the productivity formula.
Low wellness is the bane of every employer. Managing a workforce is largely managing the wellness of that workforce. Since there is no such thing as paying more for higher wellness or requiring higher wellness to be hired, most of your firing will be of players with low wellness.
Workers are becoming increasingly aware of the effect that the Quality of the companies in which they work has on their wellness and, more importantly, the real value of working at a lower Quality company. If you operate a Q1 company, your job offers need only beat every other Q1 company, not every other company. Likewise, for Q2 and above, either you want to beat every other job of the same Quality and lower Quality, or you want to provide an attractive alternative to a higher Quality job that offers savings in terms of making wellness easier to maintain.
4d - Max Productivity
Generally speaking, you always want this, and you want to be as little away from this as you can. Here's the penalty:
10 (you're fine), 9 or 11 (a 5% penalty), 8 or 12 (a 10% penalty), 7 or 13 (a 15% penalty), 6 or 14 (a 20% penalty), 5 or 15 (a 25% penalty).
This goes up to 20, where the penalty becomes 50%, the maximum penalty. For a Houses company, Maximum Productivity is at 20 employees, and these penalties are halved.
You may often find yourself hiring lower skill players than you usually would in order to make sure you maintain Max Productivity, as the lowest skills (and especially skill 0) tend to fill with workers the fastest.
5. Hiring is Half the Battle
5a - It's Okay to Be Evil
Firstly, eRepublik is almost an inversion of real life in any case, in terms of who does all the real-life work at a company. Each of the employees spend about 5 seconds a day looking at the page and clicking, making for less than a minute's work for the whole crew. Meanwhile, a company manager can easily spend 15-20 minutes or more managing just one company: scanning the employee lists, checking the job market offers, and frequently checking the marketplace offers and adjusting his prices. To think that a human being deserves no premium for 20 minutes of his day, while the people who are on autopilot deserve everything, is essentially exploitation of the person who spends that time and even invested the GOLD to be able to do it.
So do not feel bad about looking out for yourself. Moreover, do not feel bad about looking out for bargains in the job market. Consider it nothing other than recompense for the many employees who will happily join your company with 30 wellness, the closest thing to thievery authorized and unavoidable by the game mechanics.
5b - No, It's Not
At the same time, looking out for your employees can mean a lot. It tends to mean more in countries that have smaller labor markets. You see, each of your employees is a human being too. As you tick one of them off and they quit, they make a mental note to avoid you in the future if possible. Likewise, if you are kind to them, they are more likely to stick with you even if they may temporarily be able to get a nickel more somewhere else. And, of course, if you want to hire the people who check for the highest wage, you'll have to be the highest wage. One of the best ways to do that is to pay slightly more than the wage at which you hire, so that you're a little insulated from the fluctuation at the current prices.
5c - Papa Smurf Company
The Papa Smurf Company (no, I'm not sure how I made that up) tries to make personal contact with each person they hire and educate them about the game. It tries to make sure that they understand the importance of wellness. It may offer those with low wellness the ability to take a reduced pay in exchange for Food and Gifts. It may also make such gifting arrangements on a regular basis with employees of any wellness. The theme here is that the company manager is an active one. By being active, the company manager can win loyalty from the workers, which means that they are less likely to be scanning the job market and looking to leave. That not only means that you keep a good employee but that you don't have to look for another one. Turnover gives an immediate hit to your Max Productivity, and you may go through several bad employees in the meantime. The idea of a Papa Smurf Company is to make good employees where others won't bother.
5d - Me and My Home Boys
This is how you can get all the benefits of a Papa Smurf Company without having to do all the hand-holding and bribery. Simply round up as many friends as you can, put them in your company, and pay them fairly. This is also how a cooperative hires; it just goes the extra step of joint ownership and shared profit.
If you don't have 9 friends, you can always make use of a few "zombies" for less hassle and to maintain Max Productivity. These are workers who eventually stop showing up. They will show "X" for every day of the week because they don't work.
5e - Just Fishing
This might be the most profitable way to operate without being as personable as required by the previous strategy. Just keep looking on the job market for "good deals," even when you are at full employment. The difference between a very profitable company and an unprofitable one is that the very profitable company will adjust job market offers every day, even several times a day, to be able to get the most out of every job slot. Whenever you get some extra employees, fire the least profitable ones, in a constant refinement.
Somebody using this strategy should not worry too much about making raises, either. Getting a hire that doesn't realize when they've jumped a skill bracket or when the wage market heats up is a good deal that got better.
5f - Too Rich for My Blood
Sometimes the job offers get very hot. This often happens when one or more people open up a new company at the same time. This is when you're going to have to do some damage control. Stop bidding in the skill brackets in which you primarily hire, for one thing, as you're going to end up driving your employees over to the dark side with the competition. If you already have sufficient workers, the focus is on keeping them and keeping max productivity. It can be useful to make one big raise to all the workers, to a wage that is higher than the current increase, so as to exceed the job offers on market by a comfortable margin. Why exceed them? Because people are often motivated to check competing offers after they've gotten a raise (yes, perhaps even more likely than if they didn't). The idea is that you want to make sure that they know they are benefiting from the wage hike, but you don't want to adjust job offers daily and you definitely don't want your workers checking the job offers daily if they are "hot" at the time. This may also be a good time to become more active (see "Papa Smurf Company"
😉and offer fringe benefits like gifting. Wait for things to cool off before doing more aggressive hiring.
You can also fire the entire workforce, temporarily, if most of them have already quit. This will release some workers to find other jobs, allowing the wage market to normalize more quickly, and it will also allow your company to sell at the higher prices on the marketplace the products that were made with less expensive labor (assuming that you use stockpiling).
5g - Rotating Door Company
Historically used during times of occupation when the number of companies have been dramatically reduced but also used by high-Quality companies to avoid the start-up costs of making a second factory, the "Rotating Door Company" allows players to work one day at a time. The manager places job offers far in excess of what he can employ at Max Productivity and continuously fires workers as they arrive so as to stay close to the Max Productivity required for efficiency.
A variation on this theme involves shifts, where 10 different players congregate into a Manufacture company, and when they've all arrived, they work. When they've all worked, they are fired, and the second shift files in. This is only possible with communication and scheduling permitted, for example, in a militia.
6. Skill Level Lore
6a - Newbies are good employees
Skill 0 jobs are very interesting, for several reasons. Here are some of them.
When you first start the game, the only kind of job you can get is a skill 0 job.
When you want to change your profession, the only kind of job you can get is a skill 0 job.
When the game tells you to find a job, the job list you are given is for skill 0 jobs.
This last reason is why you can sometimes hire players of skill 1, 2, 3 or even higher with your skill 0 job offers, even when there are more competitive job offers at the higher skill levels. The second reason is why you can sometimes hire players who are experienced at the game and maintain their wellness well (or, for that matter, have really low wellness) and want your skill 0 job. The first reason, however, is the most interesting.
It is for the first reason that skill 0 jobs fill the fastest. If you ever need to fill out your company to get Max Productivity, the quickest way to do it is with a skill 0 job offer. It is sometimes for this reason that even high Quality companies, to the chagrin of people who help new players, place their job offers here.
It is also for this reason that these employees are some of the most likely to be with your company for the rest of their lives. It is not completely uncommon to get employees that will click their way through your company for 30 days or more, even at close to minimum wage. If you fish long enough in the newbie pond, who knows what you might drag up?
Skill 0 jobs got even more interesting now that all players start at 100 wellness. That's a lot better than most new hires.
A large number of your skill 0 employees will work once or not at all. They were simply unimpressed with the game and will become zombies. A large number of your skill 0 employees will disappear completely when they hit levels 6, 7, or 8 and never return. They are, more often than not, multis that you should fire unless you want the zombie.
6b - 1 is the Loneliest Number
It takes 3 days to be able to quit a job, it takes 2 days to hit skill 1, it takes 6 days to hit skill 2, and it usually takes longer to realize you might want to quit your first job. For these reasons, skill 1 jobs are sometimes filled but are rarely worth the time.
Despite being much much slower than skill 0 hires, skill 1 hires are often faster than skill 5 and higher hires. If you want Max Productivity without angering those who believe they control skill 0 jobs, try looking at skills 1 and 2. Many countries encourage only Q1 companies to post skill 0 jobs, in order to make maintenance of the health of new players easier.
6c - 2 is as bad as 1
Well, not completely, but some things make this tend to be so. Even though people will spend ten days at skill 2, many government skill 0 job centers refuse to release their workers to the wild until their sixteenth day of work, at skill 3, much to the detriment of their economies. At the same time, some people still don't realize that they can get a higher paying job, or at least a higher pay job that's still at Q1 (there is some confusion here because those job offers may be on a subsquent page). So it takes them a while to become competitive.
6d - Skill 3 is Key
It is by this time, 16 days of work, that most players have either figured out that they can change jobs or have been fired from their government job. If you have a Q1 or Q2 company and you want to look for bargains or run a Papa Smurf Company, this is a good place to focus. People will spend only 20 days at skill 3, which means that you should be attentive for those who level to skill 4, if you are the kind who gives payraises to keep them.
6e - Skill 4 is Magic
This is where most companies find their bread and butter. After speeding through the first four brackets in just 36 days, workers begin the long 50 day march through the fourth level of skill. This means that a huge number of workers at any given time are either entering this skill bracket, getting fired, or jumping jobs. It also means that they are slightly more clued in, on average, than the people who are in their first month of play. It is not unusual to run a company consisting entirely of skill 4 workers.
6f - Skill 5 to 6 for Kicks
This is where you look for bargains against skill 4, or where you look for supplementary workers against a company that likes to higher skill 7+, where a bargain of course is measured not by the margin but in the margin times the productivity. The hires are much less frequent but still do occur.
6g - Skill 7 for Fun and Profit
The "fun" part of this is that those newly minted skill 7 workers are in the same labor pool with skill 8, skill 9, skill 10, skill 11, skill 12, skill 13, skill 14, and skill 15. What does this mean? It means that it's time to go fishing! The prices for work in skill 7 are higher than the value of an actual skill 7 worker, because the job fishers are always out there, throwing away the guppies and hoping for the "big one." You can sometimes keep someone with 8 or 9 skill and can usually give a raise in hopes to keep someone with 10 or more skill, but you can generally not afford to keep the skill 7 player at the wage at which they were hired.
7. Sales
7a - Watching your industry
This is really the fundamental thing. Once your labor costs are under control, the only real way to increase profits is to increase revenues. (Raw Materials costs can be improved only by stockpiling when prices are low, once you start buying them at the world market prices.) Watch your marketplace, watch the behavior of other companies, watch the pattern of consumers. Note the time of day most people tend to log on and buy their things, whether that's Food, Weapons, or something else. Just keep a general idea in mind of what prices seem to be low and which seem to be high for that industry in the country you sell in. This will help you answer the next two questions.
7b - To stockpile or not to stockpile?
Stockpiling can be a viable strategy in any industry, except, for most of history, in Houses. The way it works as a strategy is different for different industries.
Land - There is only one factor that puts an offer at the front of a list of offers of Raw Materials at the same price, and that factor is quantity. The highest possible quantity that you can list is 999, and most companies list less. By stockpiling a reserve of about a thousand raw materials, you can list your raw materials in great quantity at a price slightly above the current price (but still a price that occasionally comes to the front). This way, you sell whenever the fluctuation is in your favor.
Weapons - Prices always go up when there is serious conflict. It will take weeks or even months for your one little company to be able to produce all the Weapons that will be used on the day of that big battle. So why not sell all of them at that time? If you have the reserves of cash to wait, go for it. When an intense battle spurs on high prices, your offers will be there to meet the increased demand.
Moving Tickets - Prices will usually go up in the weeks preceding a congressional elections. That's a given that you can count on as the 25th approaches. They also spike whenever there is a lot of people wanting to move out of the country. Having a lot of tickets to sell at these times is better than selling them when they are cheaper.
Food and Gifts - even though the demand is relatively steady, the behavior of other companies is not, and there will sometimes be shifts in price that are significant. Be ready to sell more when they swing up.
7c - To undercut or not to undercut?
In Land, it can often be very helpful to take a peek over at the neighboring Qualities. If your Quality is unusually high for some reason, when measured per Quality, you can undercut everyone else in the Quality that you inhabit in order to take advantage of that. Otherwise, if your Quality is already among the cheapest, price matching is usually best, combined with listing higher Quantity in order to come to the front of the list.
It is often useful in the industries of Food, Weapons, or Gifts to use a "price match" strategy that puts you at the same price as the lowest competitor. In the case of Food particularly, where people tend to buy one at a time, it is helpful to "quantity match" also. Very often this will make an implicit offer to the other company manager online to sell both of your stocks of Food at this price, instead of trying to cut the other out of the market. This is mostly possible because nobody wants to spend literally every waking hour managing their Food prices.
If the lowest priced offer is for a small quantity, it can be useful to place your offer higher, and wait for it to sell out. At the same time, this can instead be used as a psychological trick against other companies, especially in a slow moving industry such as Tickets. Instead of listing all of your stock, list something like 7 of it, and refresh it throughout the day as Tickets are sold. You may find people less eager to underbid you.
In Houses, if you are not selling your inventory, you should take a look at the global marketplace instead of the local one and bid aggressively enough to get people to move to your country's marketplace in order to buy from you.
7d - To export?
Firstly, if you are not producing in a country that consistently has some of the cheapest Manufacture or Constructions labor in the world, you don't even really have to consider this as an option, because it isn't one. If the company isn't profitable enough, you should exit the business and open another one where the labor is cheap, if you want to export.
Secondly, if you are managing a Land company and have never considered exporting, you should. Buying an export license is pretty much the only way to escape the stiff competition of the international marketplace and make a little more money. The information in Export Markets for Every Industry is still only a week old and can help you start your search.
To reiterate some of the words of warning there: An export license, at 20 GOLD, can take time to recover the investment. Make sure that the improvement over the local market is sufficient to be worth it. Make sure that the volume of purchases may also be sufficient to be worth it. Check the history of tax changes in the country and the general attitude of protectionism or free trade.
One neat thing about Q1 Land, as hinted before, is that you can price it more than it's worth. Newbie company managers will buy it because they think they need the corresponding Quality RM or because they don't understand how higher Quality RM's work, or just because it shows up first on the list. This means, for example, that Q1 Iron sells pretty well at this time in Poland, Indonesia, Canada, and the United Kingdom; you can often even get more with an export license for your Q1 RM company than you can with an upgrade to Q2, still selling domestically. That export license will also stay with you if you eventually do upgrade.
8. Moneychanging
8a - Buying currency
Okay, so you can go to the Monetary Market, and it will show you a list of currency you can buy, all at the same price in GOLD. Don't do that. Don't ever do that. Not in a million years. Not if your house is on fire. Why? You are in business, so you should always be looking to make more money, and that means always looking to get things cheaper. Also, it's too easy to buy currency cheaper to neglect to do it.
To do it, flip the offers around, so that you "BUY" the currency and "SELL" your GOLD. Enter an amount of GOLD you want to sell, such as 2 GOLD maybe. Then enter the amount of currency you want to get for each GOLD. You need to be at the top of the list to sell, and that means accepting less currency for each GOLD.
Any of the usual advice about watching trends to buy when it's cheap, or not undercutting when the offers below you are small, will apply here. A good tool to use is the ereptools.net Exchange Rates list, which will let you see at a glance when various currencies are showing a larger "spread" between the two sides of the monetary market: selling GOLD (when buying currency) and the "consumer option" (selling currency for their GOLD).
8b - Selling currency
Here, you get yourself onto the front page, where all the offers of currency for GOLD are. It may seem impossible because, when you list your currency, you are put at the back of the list. But one simple trick (valid even for the small time trader) will let you do so with ease.
Every offer of currency expires after approximately 5 days. Thus, you should place your offers of currency twice or three times a day, perhaps especially when the volume of purchasing is high. You can place as little as a penny and charge as much GOLD as you want, then change it later to something appropriate. It helps to have a system of numbering so that you know what the oldest offer is, so that you can change it later. This can be achieved simply by incrementing. So, your Monetary page might look something like this:
(Most people use whole numbers. This example has decimals because these currencies are being traded more often.)
This method takes practice and patience, but once mastered, like most things, it's easy.
8c - Wait, why don't I just make money with this?
Some people do. You can also use it to cut out these middle men. Or, you can become one of them, especially in the period of time in which you are saving up to buy your first company.
Why would you want to sell currency? Obviously, to get GOLD, both to buy the Raw Materials you may need in other types of currency and to build your GOLD reserves. Again, you're in it to make money, right?
And why would you want to buy it? Mostly, to buy raw materials, but also to buy the initial wages for workers or to run a strictly-export business and buy wages on a regular basis.
You can also use the Monetary Market to avoid paying Income tax when withdrawing money from your company. Instead of using the Finance page, you list an offer of 0.01 GOLD with your Organization. For example, if you want to withdraw 199 currency, list an offer of 0.01 GOLD for 19900 currency. Then wait a minute, go back to the monetary market, and use the drop-down box to switch to using your company instead of your Organization. Find your offer of GOLD for currency and buy the hundredth of a GOLD. By taking this exchange, you move the currency into your Organization without paying the Income tax that you would pay if withdrawing it on the Finance page. The same basic method can be used to pull out GOLD by selling a bit of currency (or to pull out one currency by selling a penny of another).
9. Raw Materials
9a - Understanding Quality
Two Q1 Raw Materials are no better or worse than a Q2 raw material. When you buy a Q2 raw material, 2 units are added to your RM stores, and when you buy a Q3 raw material, 3 units are added. This is the same no matter what the Quality of your own company is. I think we understand this. To find the price of the units of Raw Material purchased, divide the price you see by the Quality of what you are purchasing. Or, even better, let a script like eRepublik Plus (for Greasemonkey) do this for you.
9b - Finding cheap Raw Materials
You can do this pretty easily with the ereptools.net page but don't neglect to pay attention to the fact that currencies with bigger spreads can also give you cheaper Raw Materials, as the actual price is lower than listed.
If you have only one Organization (or even if you have only two), you're going to have to place them strategically in order to get the good deals on a consistent basis without using Moving Tickets. Pay attention to prices over several days and put your Organization in a good place for prices on most days. Your company doesn't have to be in the same country as the Organization; indeed, this is often one of the least useful places for the Organization to be.
9c - Donating cheap Raw Materials
And here is where I pay for your time in reading this article in just one link. Download Autodonater for eRepublik by alexc and use it with Greasemonkey for Firefox. All you do is buy 20 raw materials on the Organization, open another tab with your company to "
😉onate Raw Materials," and then click the Donate button after it automagically moves them for you 10 at a time. This all happens client side (i.e., not really detectable) and probably shouldn't be considered anything but a way to automate something that should be easier anyway, but IANAL (I am not a lawyer).
10. Exit, Upgrade, Expand?
10a - Exit
One mistake that even veterans make is never considering to sell their company and exit the business. Indeed, you should probably be revisiting the fundamental factors of the market you are in and the profitability of your company at least once a month. If your company isn't profitable enough to justify the capital invested in its creation, it's time to list it on the company market and make it somebody else's problem. If you do continue to operate it while it's for sale, make sure not to keep lots of RM or currency on hand, as you don't tend to be compensated enough for it.
10b - Upgrade
The upgrade is not always strictly worth it in terms of the money you make for the GOLD invested. Four Q1 companies can often out-profit one Q3 company. The problem is, when you have enough GOLD to start a Q3 company, you are probably tired of the micromanagement required for a Q1 company, let alone required to run four of them at the same time. Saving yourself some RL time is the real benefit of upgrading up in Quality rather than expanding out in quantity of companies. The other benefit, of course, is that these companies are just more profitable. Fewer people have enough GOLD to make a Q4 or Q5 (to a lesser extent, Q3), and almost all of them are intent on making a profit.
Make sure that all your products are sold before you upgrade: as the warning box will say, everything on the market, in production, or in stock will disappear. This also means that it's good to wait until you start on a new House before upgrading. The currency, raw materials, and of course workers stay with the company when you upgrade.
10c - Expand
If you do choose to increase the quantity of companies you hold, there are several ways to do it. One thing that some investors are attracted to doing is to own the "supply chain" of their finished goods company by having the Raw Materials company also. This is not really good business sense in and of itself, because it's always better to have a more profitable company (if there is one) and buy the Raw Materials from someone else. However, there is a strategy of so-called "vertical integration" if your Manufacture or Construction company is in the same country as your Land company. That strategy is to buy other people's Raw Materials cheaper so that your price becomes the best offer. This idea doesn't work that well if the market is too large to influence much.
v2 is coming, v2 is coming!
You have heard many times that you should wait for v2 before opening a business. Smile and nod, smile and nod. Open a business as soon as you can and profit off the fools who think they are being prudent, creating less competition in the marketplace that has gotten a new jolt of life from the wellness changes that have increased the consumption dramatically for a huge chunk of the economy (Houses, Food, and Gifts).
Food and Houses are already good and are getting better because they will be differentiated not only by Quality (and they are already the most differentiated products by Quality) but also by the allocation of "Customization Points" within each Quality. You might actually find a niche in v2, and you will find plenty of opportunity in the weeks and months before the new economic module is launched.
And why not list it for a premium price at "Companies for Sale" in that first week of v2 when the GOLD come rushing in? Quite a good exit strategy!
Are we there yet?
Well, this article is finished, but it is by no means complete. It's just what came to mind when I sat down and started writing. Feel free to offer your own words of wisdom or comments on it.
Here are some of my past articles of interest to the company owner:
* Business Opportunities in 27 Countries
* Finding and Funding your New Business Plan
* Home Economics: Making Money
* Home Economics: Saving Money
* Business Opportunities in 27 Countries #2 (still useful for showing how research is done)
And here are some more:
* The Economy: Past, Present, and Future (the future is now)
* How I Made 7 GOLD Overnight and You Can Too (maybe...)
* Graduate to Become a Two-Dozen Clicker (has more pics than this guide)
* Best Jobs in the New World (relatively recent wage data)
* Export Markets for Every Industry (also recent data)
Bon appetit.
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Comments
Nice one!
Vote 🙂
Voted... but loo long man... get a shorter manual , easier to read for all
Shorter means editing means more work. Maybe v1.1. 🙂
WHY ARE YOU SO HARD CORE?!
VOTED FOR EPICNESS!
Voted!!!
\o/ \o/ \o/
, ,
voted
v
Voted
amazing
pretty good article!
Voted, Buck this is one big walltext, i wonder how much can it support, waiting for the next article to see this 🙂
NICE! o7
OMG, thanks for this, really useful...
Να ξεραμε και καλυτερα αγγλικα θα ηταν ακομη καλυτερα , παρ΄αυτα Voted
Very nice one!
thank you
useful passage🙂
Nice!
You deserve mine subscribe, keep with that work.
Voted buck good article 😉
Naw, I will just cheat and use Multis like the majority of Peenix does... Make my Gold that way... Nothing seems to happen to them for ruining the game...
v
very good job and very extended as usually 😛
loooong one 😉 lots of writing - most appreciated o/
I think is the best.. and written by the Big one..!! voted and already subbed
very nice Buck 🙂
Excellent ! Thx + Vote
good job!
EPIC indeed
voted
VoTeD
Voted! 🙂
Συμφωνώ με τον/την Kypcom Voted
Amazing article. Gratz buck
v Good 🙂
Please vote!
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/nurettin-bay-return--1304987/1/20" target="_blank">http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/nure[..]/1/20
voted and thank u... 😃
Excellent!
very useful
voted
HAWT
THIS IS INSANE! (But useful, if I ever make another company I will take a look at this.)
You could probably improve the wiki page on companies.
Great article indeed , Megavote !
that was !@#$ing amazing.
v
Very amazing. Voted and will shout.
voted, nice article
voted perfect
Wow Buck!!!
Thats an excellent article!
It really is more like an encyclopedia rather than a guide!
This is the most comprehensive business guide i have seen, very thorough work, i say bravo! V+S!