[Ministry of Trade] Get your market updates here!

Day 608, 09:42 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Ministry of Trade
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[img]http://i596.photobucket.com/albums/tt47/IainKeers/handshake-1.jpg?t=1248103506[/img]

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the latest edition of General Manager News. This is just a brief update from the Ministry of Trade on our actions, the state of our domestic markets and some good places to trade abroad.

Over the last week my two Under-Ministers, Frank Furglar and Count Drakula, have been working with me to keep an eye on trading and see if we can sort out those GMs who have problems.


First of all I’d just like to pop a little graph in here. Some of you will recognise me as the guy who wrote ‘the Socialist Challenge’, a document about introducing socialist economics into the eUK. That was a theoretical piece, but one part of it (namely food regulation) was taken up by our President Hassan as his economic policy for this term. Since then people have said that the market is strong, not volatile and provides a good price. Here is a graph charting changes in the market over the last week or so (sorry for the incomplete data, I didn’t record an exact figure every day).

[img]http://i596.photobucket.com/albums/tt47/IainKeers/Q2food-13th-20th-1.jpg?t=1248103814[/img]

Sorry it’s a bit distorted, the game only allows a small sized image. Essentially the graph shows the price of proposed nationalised food companies vs. The current market price. As you can see the market is reasonably competitive to start with, offering citizens food at a price that is reasonably affordable to most (but not crucially skill 0 workers). However as the week goes on we can see the price soar to 1.76 today on the 20th. The market is very volatile and many normal citizens are probably switching to Q1 food because of this, meaning lower health & lower productivity. Something to think about at least.


Over the last couple of weeks Frank Furglar’s Home Trade division has been accumulating data on average market prices, which is useful for the purposes of comparison. Remember when looking at the data that the prices are market averages, not the lowest prices! I’ve taken out data skewed by a silly top-end price, such as £100 for 1 grain.

If you have any problems reading the graphs, click 'view image'


Food

My favourite market to talk about, food has been fairly steady in terms of average prices. Although we can see above that Q2 food has been fluctuating wildly in terms of lowest price, the average seems to be steady, if a tad high.

[img]http://i596.photobucket.com/albums/tt47/IainKeers/food1.jpg?t=1248105392[/img]

Although Q5 food was overpriced last week, that was due to low market offers and not because the food market particularly jumped. We see a slight rise in the average price of Q2 food from 1.66 to 1.93, a jump of around 16.3%. This is a little high for a week-to-week variation and I’ll be discussing ways to better moderate this essential market with the President. The only other interesting data is the solidity of the Q4 food market, which is maintained because of what I suspect is a pricing cartel organised by Q4 food company owners, something I’ll also be discussing with the President.


Gifts

I’m putting this market in because it has been in a bit of a sorry state lately. With “Operation Pig Mac” (i.e. the PEACE invasion of North America) underway sales have picked up, and with them the price of gifts.

[img]http://i596.photobucket.com/albums/tt47/IainKeers/Gifts.jpg?t=1248105584[/img]

We can see here a huge rise in the prices of both Q1 and Q2 gifts. Q1 has risen by a third and Q2 by three quarters to new highs. Having run a gifts company myself, the best price for Q1 gifts is around £1.40 and above. With prices topping £2 average gift company owners must be enjoying a rare feeling- making a profit! Q2 gifts are reaching average prices of £3.50+ and the owners of those companies must also be pleased with the turn of events in this very risky sector.


Grain

My third ‘market of the week’ for investors and managers to consider is Grain. Obviously we have a very large grain market with it being our only high resource. We see a lot of new players starting grain companies and as a result the Q1 market is heavily saturated.

[img]http://i596.photobucket.com/albums/tt47/IainKeers/grain.jpg?t=1248105898[/img]

Just look at the difference here! I’ve put the prices in ‘per quality’ format, as for those of you who don’t know a single Q2 raw material is worth two Q1s and so on. So the price per Q is very stable at Q2-Q4 at around £0.25/Q, a very reasonable price. However Q1 grain is now up around £0.40! What we can take from this data is that a lot of young inexperienced players are competing at this level. However, the problem is that Q1 grain companies produce less grain for higher wage costs than any other level, making them unprofitable. So we see increasingly GMs raising their prices and then being undercut. The high market prices here are sustained by other new players buying Q1 grain despite it being more expensive, simply because they don’t understand how the quality system works.


Weapons

Finally I want to show you some data about the weapons industry. I’ve omitted Q5 weapons as the results are heavily skewed by top-end prices that are double the going rate. Weapons are a fun one to look at, as the prices rely almost exclusively on war. Operation Pig Mac offered our citizens the chance to train by fighting on the Canadian side and a lot of citizens bought weapons for that. After joining PEACE some citizens moved to France or Indonesia to fight there, and bought cheap British guns when they left.

[img]http://i596.photobucket.com/albums/tt47/IainKeers/weapons.jpg?t=1248106432[/img]

We can see from the data that the prices of Q1, Q2 and Q3 weapons have all risen marginally due to demand outstripping supply. At the minute the profit margins on Q2 weapons are particularly good.



International Trade

Markets to look into:

Bulgaria!: Now we have new friends over at PEACE we have new markets open to us. The Bulgarian food and grain market is overpriced compared to domestic grain and if you own a grain company and are looking to export then it is worth a shot!



Iran: If you’re looking at setting up a business abroad, why not look at Iran? Food prices over there tend to be very high and the currency roughly = GBP. Although grain import taxes equal around 20% the local grain is reasonable, so you don’t have to ship out your own grain.



France: If you’ve got guns to sell, or want to set up a weapons company abroad, look to France. Q2 Guns there are a staggering 0.419GOLD now, or roughly 50% more expensive than their equivalents here in the UK!



Greece: I've just been reliably told that Greece is looking for Grain imports, and that they have a 1% import rate on grain. So if you're looking to flog some of our cheap golden raw material somewhere a bit more lucrative, Greece is a fair bet.




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Iain Keers
Minister of Trade

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