Public company
Very low starting cash
26 competitors with max starting cash, experience, and aggressiveness
6 cities, 2 consumer seaports, 1 industrial
inflation / macro economy realism - on
Competence of Local competitors - low
Import quality - moderate
I ended up loading an absolutely ridiculous map, 3 cities with over 4 million population! Istanbul, Rio De Janeiro, and Hong Kong. We also have some smaller, high RWR cities in Milan, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam. What I lack is a truly low RWR city to manufacture in and export from, but if I get into any high freight industries I can just manufacture locally.
With only $10m in starting capital (and $22m available credit from the bank) my initial goal has to be investing in something that is going to have a quick payback period and expand my credit line so I can continue to expand until I start generating steady profits to fund expansion. With competitor starting capital set to massive the AI should be starting somewhere between 500M and 750M in cash so I'll have to grow very rapidly to compete.
My specialization is in semi products, so as far as manufacturing retail products I have no research specialty to give me an edge. I could retail from the seaport, but many RWmod products can only be sold out of specialty retailers, have the option to be retailed but are better used as a semi product to be manufactured a step further, or have low demand.
For example cheeseburgers are available from the seaport for $1.99 at 51 quality in Istanbul where they sell for $5.19 at 18 quality and 17 brand rating. However cheeseburgers value is also determined 40% by their brand and only have a demand for about 580k units and $3million in revenue in a 4 million pop city like Istanbul. Sure I could almost definitely retail it for a profit, but its not a phenomenal option.
So if I want to deviate from retailing the seaport at the beginning and picking through each product trying to figure out which ones will be the most profitable, what kind of store I'll need to sell them, and the best city to retail them in I started looking for ways I could get into manufacturing quickly. I landed on two potential classes, Gasoline and Public Utilities. These products are severely more price oriented than other product classes, quality and brand are not terribly important. Utilities require more inputs to manufacture, and not all of them are available in this game right away. If I'm going to start manufacturing I'm definitely going to focus on Istanbul with its massive population and lowest RWR available. I should be able to get land there cheapest from the start.
Gas on the other hand is much, much easier to get into. Gasoline and Diesel fuel only require 1 input (oil) to manufacture, quality is largely determined by the quality of the oil (40%), and in my chosen starter city of Istanbul price is a 64% concern, quality is 25%, and brand is a minimal 11%. Best of all Istanbul has $260M revenue demand for Gasoline alone. Combined with the demand for Bio Fuel, Diesel, and Motor lubricant there's already over half a billion in revenue demand for this product class in Istanbul alone. And oil is available from the seaport.
So Its settled, I'll start producing gasoline in Istanbul right away. The seaport oil is 60 quality so I'll get .4 x 60 = 24 product quality from the oil, and an additional .3 x 60 = 18 quality from my production tech. So I can start out with an estimated 42 quality gas which should be able to compete with the local competition of 23 quality 18 brand.
I set up my first factory like so, the base design the game provides uses 2 oil inputs but there was a thread I found here that suggested 1 oil input can handle all 6 manufacturing units. I built it near a seaport intentionally, I like to do this in case I find its profitable to export a product to a higher RWR city. At the moment the land here is also about as cheap as I'm going to find. The best retailing land isn't too far away, and luckily gas doesn't seem to have very high in city trucking costs.
I used my remaining money and stretched myself very thin to buy 3 2x2 plots of land and build 3 gas stations here
So if my gas stations and factory don't turn a profit immediately I'll be forced to issue stock just to stay afloat. I set up my gas stations like so to maximize their throughput.
Lets see how it goes...
January 1990:
I made a little spreadsheet to track our profits from the first month and realized pretty quickly that as the company grows month to month its going to be too much of a pain to input revenues and profits into a spreadsheet for every single firm as they change over time. Our 3 gas stations and level 1 barely make up even a sliver of the demand for the city. I really wish I had multiple retail floors enabled about now. I could see it taking 30 or more fully developed gas stations to satisfy the demand in this city for the Gas product alone. For the first month our 3 gas stations are working the factory to max capacity, but supply is starting to level out with demand at the factory. I may be able to have a 4th gas station selling off the factory in the future, but my retailing units will level up much faster than my factory units so I may keep a 3:1 gas station:factory ratio until the factories start outpacing demand as they train up years from now. It's safe to say revenues and profits will grow next month with no changes as the factory should produce more overall units in the month of February.
My total profit for the month of January was 2.691m excluding changes to the value of my land. This is a pretty promising start, and the short term plan is to sit on our growing profits and wait until we have enough cash + available credit to raise a total of $35m to invest in a second factory and 3 more gas stations. Gasoline appears to be a highly profitable business. With our imported oil our unit cost is roughly .45c / unit and we're currently selling gasoline for $58.04 in our retail stores. Our freight brings us a little over $1 / unit in total cost.
April 1990:
I deviated from the plan and used the cash I had coming in to buy back as much of our own stock as possible in February. For a few million I was able to get our CEO back to owning 58% of the company. In March I tried something I don't usually do as well. The overall competitive rating of Gasoline in Istanbul is 0. Because demand outpaces my supply so greatly I jacked the price of Gas up to $64.17 / unit bringing our overall quality down to -15. Despite this change the demand has not seemed to lower at all, and with my sales units reaching level 2 at my retailers in March profits nearly doubled at my retail stores leading to overall profit of $7m after interest paid for the month of March (excluding land value changes)
As of April 1st we have $9m in cash and $22m in available credit. The company will build another large factory producing gasoline and 3 more gas stations to support it in the second week of April.
June 1990:
We jacked up Gas prices yet again to $70 / unit in April and built a 3rd large factory with 3 more gas stations in May. Despite having 9 gas stations selling a single product
We jacked up Gas prices yet again to $70 / unit in April and built a 3rd large factory with 3 more gas stations in May. Despite having 9 gas stations selling a single product
we are nowhere near saturating the demand with our 9 gas stations, even anticipating supply to grow in the future as the retail stores / factories level up to 9. Cash profits were $19m in June inluding our 400k monthly interest payment made ($150k was eaten by inflation at this point). With such strong profits to support the company the next step will be to set up some R&D for our gas products followed by backward integration as we expand. We will constrain the oil resource at the seaport eventually and we don't want to rely on the AI to supply such a key resource. As our money supply grows we'll also want to start using warehousing to help with the micro management.
It could be years before we even expand into a second product, even if we start saturating the market in Istanbul the market is almost as big in Rio De Janeiro and Hong Kong with no competition at the moment. However there is one company to keep an eye on, ExxonMobil. They currently produce 88 Quality diesel fuel they are selling in a few cities, with a net loss of $340k this year. Their market cap is already $750m so they are far from an acquisition target at this time, but we will be looking to buy shares in the future as we grow and surpass them. If we do want to expand our product line it will almost certainly be in Bio Fuels which do not require oil, and instead are made from sugar and sunflowers.
We will also be looking to create our first subsidiary, I don't want to micro manage several product classes. We can pump money in them to fund R&D of a product class and leave it to them to expand the business.
I'd say its about time to call it a day for this write up, will update it soon.
