Enterprises (Kebir Blue)

Was wondering Tom.. Why are my enterprises losing overall money? My enterprises are "Starship Enterprise" on GR, "Big Bucks" on FB, and "Simple Blue" on KB. They seem in order as far as employment, and trade strats. In fact, Starship Enterprise has won first place 3 times before, now its hardly making a anything, in fact, its losing money. I just need to know where the money is going.

I will take a look when I can get to it.

Thanks Jonni

My Total Assets value has declined on several occasions for no apparent reason, and none of my corps have a P/E lower than 30 or even 40. So much for being more profitable than state corps.

so, whats up? A used to be Star enterprise is now losing loades of cash. I needed to close a bunch of corps after looking more closly, but i never needed to before. You wanted this a mostly self supporting network of corps and country, yet i had to close corps that where in the red as far as "need products" goes cause they couldnt and never did make a profit. Some of my big trillion dollar corps are not making a profit anymore, acording to the graph. Yet, most of them are "Some Left" and products "OK". Which, in my understanding, is optimum place to be... need somthing done. this is an old enterprise, and everything has past the "upgraded" stage and nothing has been changed till tonight, and no new corps added for a long time. This isnt just one world, its happend to 3 enterprises on three worlds. So, why would anyone want to pay SC for another "Entity" (30gc's a month) that losses you money and you need to baby sit to make sure it at least makes even? If nothing is done, im closing my 3 enterprises, thats 90 gc's per month i dont need to worry about. Perhaps a lot more once more people wake up. AND I KNOW I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE.
(Hope im not banned for this)

You are not alone Homer, ive have the same probs.

get rid of military, electric comps, med equips, military service, military supplies, med mats, show, telephone these can not run at 300
boats maybe cable tv maybe internet
move any low labor company
and replace with service, HTS, FMU, computers, electric power, electronic comps, industrial equip, household, coal, rubber, sulfur, potass, oil, aircraft fuel, vacation, software, sold missile fuel

The problem is that in the best of cases a corp makes a profit of 10B a year. In the worst of cases (normal, in fact) is having them lose 30B (or much more) a year. The game is off balance.

Corps should break-even, or be near it, at base price. They aren't.

And then we have the game dumping stuff on the market for no reason at all. In the case of Hospitals, from the utilization page:

Product	Number of Corps	Production Capacity	Production Last Month	Utilization	Demand	Surplus
Hospitals	1460	657	613	93%	565	48

And from the pop-up:

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

The latest price that was paid on the market for this product is 1.48B SC$ per hospital. Market Price
The demand for this product was 673 last month. Demand Volume
The supply was 4,100. Supply Volume
This means there was a surplus of 3,427 product units. Difference<!-/Quote-!>

We have collected statistics about enterprises and see big differences.
The range is between losing 500B and earning 600B+.

Totals:

Total profit for enterprises owned by premium players: 19.3 T in a recent month.

Total "profit" for enterprises owned by free players" -850 B in the same month.

we will keep checking this in the coming days.

Beginners:

Beginners get help when the start with a new account and a country.
there is no support for those who start with an enterprise and it is hard for them to build corporations.
we will fix this ASAP.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

Total profit for enterprises owned by premium players: 19.3 T in a recent month.<!-/Quote-!>

Is that post automatic transfers?

Transfers do not have any influence on the profit.

transferring cash out of or into an enterprise changes its cash position, not the profit or loss.
if a corporation in the enterprise makes a 10B loss and receives a cash transfer of 10B to repair its cash position, the loss remains 10B.

for the enterprise, the loss of 10B of the corporation is counted as a loss for the enterprise (total of all corporations).
the cash transfer does not increase this loss to 20B.

There is no dumping of any products into the market.

The only interventions are taking place when there are disastrous shortages.
Any such intervention might take place when the shortage is more than 90% of the total month turnover, in such cases, and only for a very small number of products, about 10% of this shortage is added.
this has no influence on the price and the shortages continue.

The intervention never involved any weapons.
Only a very small number of products, including services, factory maintenance units and high tech services in very small numbers have been added according to these rules.

Schools, universities, hospitals and such are never added. shortages in these products cannot cause any major problem in the game.

Last week, for 7 or 8 game months, some weapons were taken out. when oversupply was over 70% of production, 10% was bought by the game master.
Such intervention took place in the past in cases where the GM though that the oversupply was caused by a direct change in the game, like the reduction in the size of military units that pushed weapons back to base and caused countries to offer weapons on the market.

The problem I have is my Enterprise makes a profit. But, my automatic cash transfers have now increased to an amount greater than my profit. So, I am losing money every month.
The real problem is I have to manually go into every country to figure out which ones are losing the money so I can close them. I have over 600 corps and I know many CEO's have even more. This is time consuming.
We need a page where we can see all of our profit/loss not for the last but the whole last year. I would prefer the last 2 or 3 years even. The only way I know to do that now is to click on the corp and scroll down to profit/loss to see the current month, current year, and previous year.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

There is no dumping of any products into the market.<!-/Quote-!>

Did you read what I posted?

613 hospital were produced. 4 100 hospitals that cannot be offered, only destroyed, were offered. Where the did almost 3 500 extra hospitals came from?

Hospitals aren't the only case. The same applies to quality and effectivity upgrades.

Also, I've been noticing the same with pharmaceutical products, because I've been buying them for cheap for a week now. I know a player isn't offering them, because the supply graph takes distinct paths when that happens.

The information the game shows in different places does not add up. It comes to reason the game is adding products unnecessarily. Take a look.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

Transfers do not have any influence on the profit.<!-/Quote-!>

Yes... that's how things should be, but that isn't how it is, that's what we are saying.

There's a good exercise for you to confirm this. Take the info from the last week or month and look at the enterprises that have reported profit in that period, and see how much their cash balance changed, ignoring manual transfers. Then publish the info here.

and to follow what zen said. many of the corps that are loosing money now... where recently big winners. closing them, or even moving them, and then closing them... well, i had to transfer 50T into one of my enterprises to cover the cost of downsizing.

and it seems to still be charging me every gm

My Enterprise has never been the huge cash machine that some players have. I never made enough profit to pay for itself, but I also never had to spend a ton of time keeping out of the red either. If I have to spend hours micro-managing it to break even, then I would rather just have country corps.

And, I echo what was posted above about corps losing money even when the products are in short supply--Military Services is a great example. Over the past year, the most product offered was 2.1 shortage and it was short almost 4B at one point. Why would these corps, then, lose money? Not huge losses mind you and I can probably get them to break even fairly easily, but they should not be losing money at all. That's the micro-managing I don't want to do. I don't want to go into every Military Service corp and tweak it just a little so it breaks even instead of running a slight loss.

I think this is a misunderstanding.

The utilization page shows the number of corporations producing hospitals, the number they are able to produce per game month(at 100% of capacity), the number produced this game month, the number requested this month and the shortage or oversupply, this game month. In this case 48 surplus this game month.

The percentage showing, is the number produced as a percentage of the production capacity.
For hospital this should always be 100 or lower because nothing is ever added or sold by players.

there are some exceptions: if many corporations produce hospitals and their welfare index is far above 100, the percentage could go up a bit. it is hardly ever the case but in theory it could reach 105 or even 110%.

The total market situation page, shows the total number of products offered and requested.
there you see an accumulated number of hospitals offered and requested and the total oversupply in this case is 3000+.

nobody is adding hospitals and nobody is removing hospitals from the market to balance it.

If there is an over supply of 50 hospitals each game month, then after 100 game months, there will be 5000. They have no place to go and if nobody is buying, they stay there.

we have no reason to add products when there is a surplus and it never happens.

Enterprises profitability is of course an issue but enterprises have a huge advantage in generating profits for the countries where the corporations reside.

these countries are frequently owned by the same player and the money paid to the countries is increasing the profitability of the countries.

more than 30% of the revenue of the enterprise goes to the country. This is a significant cost that reduced the profitability of the enterprise corporations but check the country income and you will see that in countries with many enterprise corporations, the largest income component is contributions from enterprises.

The most wealthy countries in all the worlds are countries with many such corporations.

This means that although enterprises should make profits, they are in fact very profitable for the player even if the profit does not show up in the enterprise but instead, paid to the country.

So basically is what are you are saying Tom is that the CEO game is dead and only serve to service countries?

I hope ive misread you... the CEO aspect what was drove me to SimCountry back in 2003 and back to the game last year...

If thats the case, then it needs to be easier to IPO corps. Im still finding alot of trillion dollar corps that I cant IPO, even with the profit share set to 0 and 0% tax. In alot of cases the corps are slightly above the required P/E, and some have went from slightly above the required P/E to 999 in just one game month. Thats with no changes to the corps setings. Also, if because the "loser" corps are not making you a profit, and steadily get cash automaticly, it should be free to close them. I just blew 10T closing corps last night. I cant afford to keep doing that everytime the market shifts.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

The total market situation page, shows the total number of products offered and requested.
there you see an accumulated number of hospitals offered and requested and the total oversupply in this case is 3000+.<!-/Quote-!>

That does explain all of this. I wasn't aware the factory utilization page was changed. Although, I'm pretty sure it wasn't eight days ago I last saw the hospital market in shortage.

But there's still the case of pharmaceutical products. Two days ago, after weeks in oversupply, I placed KB's market in a 20M shortage. According to the factory utilization page, there's an excess production of around 2M units every game month. That means, there should be an oversupply of 4M this game month, twelve months passed. Instead there's an extra 100M (of which I'm buying 60M now). I don't see any spike in the supply graph to suggest player action, but a steady accumulation. Even if excess production was 4M a game month, it would only place the market in a 28M surplus.

If it was up to me, I would close all of my corps. Having a corp such as this one lose money every game month with a market like this just isn't my cup of tea. I don't close them, because it gives too much trouble going corp to corp.

We did not change the trade page or utilization page for the last couple of years.

what I was saying is that the profit you see in the corporation does not tell the entire story.
there is a lot of additional profit in the form of contributions to the countries.

The most profitable accounts in the game frequently have enterprises.

Hospitals are easy to track because no one is adding nor removing products arbitrarily.

other products are more complex. Players are trying to square the market. they buy and sell on price differences and currently, also move products to other worlds.

Please check the utilization page. if you see production at more than 100% of production capacity, much more, it means that someone is selling. This is always this month.

except for that, it is hard to say. shortages could be just normal use and automatic orders or there could be someone buying wildly.

come to think of it, we did have a blip with these products.
we have seen that health costs were increasing for a long time and found out that this is because of shortages in several health related products.

as the price is out of our control, we have recently slightly reduced the number of products used by a hospital each month. The change was small but when recalculating their stocks, countries concluded that they have sufficient stocks of these products and purchasing probably dropped for one or two game months.

However, when supplies declined, orders resumed at a pace close to what it was before.

I have not seen this but I assume this happened when the numbers declined.
health costs are down recently, also because we have reduced the number of workers in hospitals. The number of doctors and nurses did not change.

I think the core point here is that, while many of us have enterprises, from an enterprise standpoint we don't care about the "profit" going to countries, we'd like to at least break even.

In my prior incarnation before the automatic transfer gig was established, I would scrap the cash off all my corporations above cash value X and then raise all the others to that value. Then the auto transfer was put in and the limit for removing cash was raised to 60B.

Then, I could no longer support the weak by raiding the strong, so I had to turn to dumping in most of what little money I made to keep things afloat. Eventually, it became too much, and I left.

As it stands, I know I don't use profit sharing on my enterprise corporations. Why? Simple...they're already getting enough money extracted due to country resources used and all the country taxes floating around.

I won't deny that currently, I'm mostly profitable now, but most of that is due to changes to combat the enterprise taxation formula, as I understand it, targeting industries that seem to stay in the red, and luck.

Part of the problem is most likely due to so much being in extreme shortage. Another part is probably due to the removal of a tool to combat losses (transferring money internally). I do understand the logic behind essentially removing half of that tool, the automatic transfer is ultimately a form of punishment. I won't deny that I much prefer the loans. Loan interest is ridiculously cheap and beats the socks off of having 130B extracted from what little someone can get from an enterprise that theoretically made 350B in a game month. Since that profit amount for all corporations does not reflect country taxation nor does it reflect the percentage of ownership due to public corporations (as best as I can tell).

Does the preceding paragraph mean I want those shortages magically fixed. No. I wanted these shortages, it adds some realism, the challenges are driving them down and thereby the prices. The difficulty is with everything shifting in production/consumption about every week (it seems like). I expect that eventually these shifts will stabilize. The ultimate question is whether a stable economy is possible.

I try not to complain much because i know its hard to manage this game and well it seems like a lot of people complain but i also noticed another problem that frequently gets us as ceo's. ill use one poduct as an example but it happens fairly often. since the so called supply fairy has been killed the amount of goods a particular company produces goes up and down dramaicly in this case ill use a neccesary product as an example, Water maintenance. about 4 months ago they produced 80 units each then we killed the supply fairy they became in very short demand some of us realized that peoples countries were being hurt through lack of a neccesar item, water. so we built tons to fill the need like we were recomeded to do, we almost had it stabalized then it was then bumped up to produce 150 units a month and it was overnight pushed into the green a little that was no big deal we only had to close few i said to myself ok well its for the good of the game i can eat that investment, once we stabalized it again ( the market ) poof now they produce 200 units once again pushin aproximently 25 % of all water maintenance companies into loses. since most of those companies grew to be a trillion or two trillion value companies closing them costs us like 300 billion $ each. i think the same thing just happened to medical equipment and thiers several other companies, i didnt see the need or reasoning in adjusting it up further to force the market into a 25 % green overstock. our option is decrease salaries to almost nothing loose money for a while and try and wait it out hoping others break before we do and close thiers or pay trillions in closing costs

also my ceo's say they make 500 to 700 billion a month and with all upgrades turned off it still varies from losing 100 billion to making 300 billion a month ive never made anywhere close to the false 700 billion a month profit statement in its financial page. you may have killed the supply fairy but you havnt really allowed us to stabalize markets by constantly changing the amount of goods companies produce, we may plan and do things for three months to position ourselves in the markets well. then poof with no notification our markets destabalized by these lil hidden surprises once again. it be nice if you would put those types of information in the game news or better yet let us stabalize it by keeping all production numbers same.

why do the production numbers of factories keep changing ? just wondering