Economy Guide [001] Working as Manager vs. Employees

Day 3,758, 12:45 • Published in USA USA • by Marcelaxy

Hi, I'm Marcel and welcome to the Economy in eRepublik.


In this series of articles I'd like to share some insights in the world of business in eRepublik. I will mostly focus on eUS citizens and producing in eUS regions

In this firt part I compare Working as Manager vs. Employee Work and explain when and for whom each one is viable.




Employees



To make it short and simple: Employee Work is not profitable.

Unless you are using Tycoon Packs.

The Price of HRM for example is 69cc, wages are somewhere at 350cc. In the best regions you'll have a productivity of 193% meaning with a Q5 HRM Company you produce 1.93 x 2.5 HRM = 4.825 HRM.
4.825 x 69cc = 332.925cc

So you'll lose 17.075cc per employee working in a Q5 HRM Company.

When you use a Tycoon Pack however: 2.13 x 2.5 x 69cc = 367.425cc

So a profit of 17.425cc per employee working in a Q5 HRM Company with an active Tycoon Pack. This is similar for Q1-5 House Companies and Q1 Air weapons.

Tycoon Packs themselves are a cost factor, too.

They cost 150k each (price of the last one I bought, might be higher now).
Each one contains 20 Gold, 150 Works, you can buy 50 gold a day for 8 days and a productivity bonus of 20% for 8 days.



"But Marcel. It says 7 days, not 8 days"

This is right, but like every other pack's perk, the timer doesn't count the daychanges, it counts the time since the purshase.

So when you buy it late enough in the day, you can easily use the gold per day and productivity bonus for 8 days.

With this in mind, let's calculate how many employees you'll need to profitably use a Tycoon Pack. To simplfy it, let's assume an Employee Work Costs 350cc, Gold 450cc and the profitability per Employee Work is 20cc.

With this, for the 8 days, you'll need to use

(150000 - 20 x 450 - 350 x 150) / 20 / 8 = 553.125 ≈ 554

employee Works per day so the Tycoon Packs pay themselves.
(under the assumption that you are not Working as Manager)

The 50 gold-per-day-limit is a nice bonus for those who are constantly limited by the 10-gold-per-day limit. Gold from the exchange market is way cheaper than the cheapest gold from packs (>1000cc per Gold).

You'll however need a diverse pool of companies to make sure you don't get hit too much by changes in the market (also means you should have way more work places than 554). Additionally Holdings in different countries to keep the employee number high, large storage capacities and lots of CC for wages.

The minimum starting investment is ~ 5000 Gold + 1.000.000cc just to pay the Tycoon Packs reliably. With more than that, you can start thinking about making profit of Employee work.


Work as Manager


Work as Manager is the cheaper way for new players or everyone wanting to earn some extra bucks.


To keep things simple, I always assume 193% productivity (max resources + max pollution) and 2% = 5.8cc work taxes since that's the most reliable prognosis for the future in eUSA. Also 0.8cc for the food you consume. So a total cost of
6.4cc for each Work as Manager. (FRM and higher Q Food might have higher than 193% productivity due being rarer)

How profitable is each company?

FRM



You can ignore Q1 and Q2. Per CC, they have almost the same productivity as Q4 but with work taxes, and health playing a bigger role. To keep it nice and short, I give you the profitabilities and amortization time of Q3-Q5 Companies. With and without Tycoon Pack, assuming 22/30 days with active Tycoon Pack, a Gold Price of 450cc and 5.1cc per FRM, 193% regional productivity, 2% work tax (5.4cc) + 0.8cc for food. In this article I am defining the "amortization" as the time needed to re-earn 100% of the initial cost for a company.


Q3: 5.904cc (762 Days) / 6.839cc (658 Days)
Q4: 10.825cc (785 Days) / 12.134cc (700 Days)
Q5: 18.208cc (865 Days) / 20.078cc (784 Days)


WRM



Same story as with FRM, for WRM I assume a price of 7.7cc each.

Q3: 12.177cc (369 Days) / 13.588cc (331 Days)
Q4: 19.607cc (433 Days) / 21.588cc (393 Days)
Q5: 30.753cc (512 Days) / 33.576cc (469 Days)


And remember: These daily profits and amortization times are for 2% Work Tax, not for the current 3%. The profit of FRM is pathetic. There's no point in investing into its production right now. If you want to build up a self-supply, I recommend Q5 FRM Companies. You can use your available health more effectively and the amortizadtion time is barely longer than the lower Qs.

As FRM Regions I can recommend Nebraska and Washington D.C. in eUSA or Sichuan in eChina.

If you want to produce WRM, you are a bit more flexible. You can chose wether you prefer more money for your health or quicker growth due to faster amortization. It depends on how much daily health you have left and wether you are making use of the military module. To be better prepared for the future and changes in the economy, I would rather recommend you to go for Q4 at least.

As WRM region I can highly recommend Kentucky in eUSA.


Food




The productivity of Food Companies increases proportionaly to its Q.
The exception is Q7. Q7 Food is de facto "Q10 Food" while it has the FRM requirement of "Q20 Food".

A great advantage of Factories is that you can either upgrade them or sell them on the Market instead of having to sell them back to Plato for a joke price.

Assuming FRM prices of 5.1cc and Food prices of 0.17 for Q1, 0.33 for Q2 and 0.49 for Q3, 193% productivity, the Profits and the amortization times are the following (also I assume 72 Gold for buying a Q3 company off the market, there's plenty):

Q1: 16.242cc (277 Days) / 17.963cc (250 Days)
Q2: 36.973cc (365 Days) / 40.260cc (335 Days)
Q3: 57.705cc (561 Days) / 62.577cc (517 Days)

Upgrading from Q1 to Q2: +20.731cc (434 Days) / +22.297cc (403 Days)
Upgrading from Q2 to Q3: +20.732cc (1085 Days) / +22.297cc (1009 Days)

Upgrading from Q1 to Q2 during 30% off: 303 / 282 Days amortization time
Upgrading from Q2 to Q3 during 30% off: 759 / 706 Days amortization time


I could do this for Q4+ but this would require too much math and text. The only thing you have to know is: Only upgrade to Q3 or higher on Days with a Company Upgrade Discount and only when you don't want to increase your use of health for WaM.

The only times Q4+ Food Companies are profitable are during spikes in food prices due to drastically increased health recovery. Then you can even profitably use Employee Work with them. But more on this in another Topic.



If you want Q1, Q2, Q3 (or higher) Food companies depends on wether you want to make quick money and grow fast or if you don't want or can't afford more health for WaM anymore.

The best Food production places are Nebraska & D.C. in eUSA and alternatively Suichuan in China.

All amortization times don't include the storages neccessary to operate your companies smoothly. Fresh citizens will have to buy them while older ones may got enough for free from the Weekly Challenge etc.


Edit: Q7 is never an option. Because it requires twice as much FRM per Health you produce. Only during events with high Food prices and normal FRM prices, they are viable. However usually the FRM price will also explode within a few days making them useless again.



Weapons


You can forget Q1-Q6, the weapons are usually worth less (or barely more) than the WRM you need to produce them.

Q7 weapons are an interesting topic. These companies can be profitably WaM'd and operated with employee works. Depending on the Q7 and WRM price (and if you use a Tycoon Pack), the daily profit can be anything between 300 and 2000cc.

Because of this high variation (and because I'm writing this in the minutes after publishing the article), I can't give you exact daily profitability and amortization times.

I can only tell you so much: Per Gold you are better of building a Q7 Weapons company on days with a discount than upgrading Q2 Food to Q3 and not quite as good as producing WaM.

Even without Tycoon Packs, using employees for Q7 weapons can also be profitable at times. Q7 Weapon Companies are definitely the go-to if you don't want to spend too much health and rather want to fight or simply because you already use most of your daily health for producing. They are even more "profitable" when you primarly use them as a self-supply since you get your weapons VAT-free.

I recommend you building your Q7 weapons company in Kentucky. Building in a country with less stable tax and resources - or in one of our 50 regions without high weapons pollution - is always a big risk since relocating those companies is extremely expensive.




Future Topics

- Events: How to make a Profit
- Holdings & Residence
- Employees & Tycoon Pack (more indepth)
- Storage Wars
- Houses, Packs & Weekly Challenge
- (more?)