Corporate Purchase Quality

I've seen a lot of guides in various places suggesting that you buy bulk goods(e.g., coal for a steel mill) for your corps at high quality, and small-quantity goods(e.g., factory maintenance) at low quality to maximize output quality at a reasonable price. However, I haven't seen any way to actually do this, just a way to change the default purchase quality of *all* goods. Is this possible to do in bulk? I have about 400 corps, so I'm sure not doing manual orders for all of them every month.

That used to be a thing. I used to do it along with other econ optimizers. It wasn't so much the quantity but the unit-price of the items that drove the strategy.

Using your product examples, one unit of factory maintenance is much more expensive than one unit of coal. However, they would both contribute to the produced product quality equally. This meant you bought the cheap unit-priced items at higher quality and the more expensive unit-priced items at lower in order to lower the cost of supplies and produce the same quality product.


It worked until this update:

October 9, 2013

211. Weighted Raw Materials Quality [ top ]

The average quality of raw materials now takes into account the price of the product in the computing of the average. In extreme cases, the use of military bases of any quality, in the production of maintenance products, did not have any influence on the resulting quality due

Ah, okay. Shows me for reading old guides.

It still makes economic sense for a country or CEO to buy FMU in bulk at 120 quality, and then sell it to one's corps. This is not the outdated average supply quality strategy because corps use so few FMUs that the average is not affected much.

The Trade page of each country and CEO has a menu item called "trade with own corporations." That mechanism allows one to sell FMUs to all of one's corps with just a few clicks.

Those FMUs at 120 quality allowed my corps to cut costs by 40-60M/game month. That's not a whole lot but it's still nice for cheapskates like me. That meant supplying my corps with 120 months worth of FMUs roughly every two real weeks. Eventually I stopped because that chore got boring.

But it is possible to find cost savings by tinkering with supplies.

But if the quality of the output is weighted by cost, that'll wind up hurting quality just as much as cutting spending on your coal by 40-60M/month.

No. As I said, I saved money. That means that my corps earned 40-60M/game month more than before I implemented the strategy. What coal?

Coal as an example of a bulk low-value good, not necessarily that particular resource.

If I want a corporation to produce at 330 so I can buy it, for example weapons, what do I need to set the supplies to? I took 1 corporation and set it to 300 to see what happens & it's still buying stuff at 140.

Could it be that those supplies of 140 quality were bought before you changed the requested quality?

To get a product quality of 330, your corps need to be public and you need to own less than 25% of their shares. Then it's best to purchase supplies of 215 quality, although 210 sometimes does it.

Is 330 the highest produceable, then? People seem to imply it is, but I've never seen it specifically stated.

The highest product quality I produce is 337. It's more common to get 330-333 as the highest.

Another thing, few weapons corps are profitable enough to IPO. The low demand for weapons keeps their market prices low, relative to their base prices. A lot of weapons are unprofitable to produce. Insufficient profits prevent most weapons corps from reaching the minimum market value of 500B required for an IPO.

none of my corporations make it to that value. Most are around 200B. Is that because my profit share is 80%?

So what is the best I can hope for from a country owned company? Right now I am getting 270 quality from my experiment buying 300 quality supplies. doesn't seem right lol.

The lower the profit sharing is, the higher the market value will be. The highest product quality for private corps is about 270 for country-controlled corps and about 303 for enterprise-controlled corps.

You're wasting money buying supplies of 300 quality for your country-controlled corps. Those corps don't benefit from using supplies of more than around 215 quality.

Most of them I have set to buying 200 quality supplies & they produce 250 quality product.

I set one to buying 300 quality supplies just to see what it does. My intent is to figure out what to set for highest quality (270 you say) so I can buy high quality weapons directly instead of using the market. I'm going to try a brand new corporation set at 225 quality to see if that makes 270. Brand new should eliminate averaging of old supplies.

So it looks like if I want to sell a corporation I need to lower how much profit I'm skimming off of it. I was wondering. Best I can get right now is 400 and they make huge profits, but I have them all set at 80% profit sharing with 30% tax.

Thanks Madoff!

I can't buy anything other than 180 quality. Every time I set purchase Q to anything else, it always reverts back to 180 at the turn of the month. I've mentioned it on the problems forum, with no response. So I guess I'm stuck with it.