Economy
Holding Company
Pick an industry to build your company in.
eRepublik gives you plenty of choices if you want to become a business manager and manage your own companies. There are 20 raw factories; 5 for producing food raw materials (FRM), 5 for weapons raw material (WRM), 5 for house raw materials (HRM) and 5 for aircraft raw materials (ARM). In addition, you have 7 different companies to produce food and weapons, 5 for houses and 1 for aircraft. All raw material factories have the same quality of output, while the other companies produce different quality goods.
It is also important to note that the airplane and housing companies (both finished and raw materials) both do not allow you to WAM (work as manager) which is a way for you, the company owner, to expend 10 health and work in that company. You’re allowed to WAM in all of your companies at once (or choose which ones you would like to do it in), there is no limit on the amount of companies you can WAM in per day (as long as you have the required health to do so).
Choose the region
You must have a holding company in the region you wish to place your company. In order to build a holding company, you must first move your citizen to that region, and then create the holding company.
Under the "My Places" dropdown, go to the "company" tab
When picking a region, you should be mindful of the vulnerability of the region to foreign takeover (if the region your company is located in is occupied by a foreign country that is not your citizenship, your productivity is affected).
Pollution-Region's Resource Bonuses
You also need to check for pollution in that region. Pollution is a reflection of the amount of companies in each industry located in that region, regardless of when they are built in comparison to yours. It changes daily based upon what companies were worked the previous day, and the data can be found on the region’s page (for example, Brussels, is found here: https://www.erepublik.com/en/main/region/Brussels .
Additionally, you need to be mindful of the region’s resource bonuses. Those are found on that same page and each industry can have varying bonuses in each region which all affect your company's productivity. Lastly, your citizen must be located in the region your company is in for your to be able to WAM. Therefore, if you intend to WAM for your company, ensure you are able to move there/be located there daily.
Assign your companies
Then, assign your companies to the Holding you have created or alternatively to another Holding you own (you have to refresh the page before they appeared under the correct holding).
You can only have 1 holding per region, but if you want a second holding in a different state, you can do that by moving, then repeating the process.
Employees
Employees may seem beneficial to have for your company. However, for the last year or so, when wages significantly increased, it has become extremely difficult to make any sort of profit while paying employees wages. To check for your chosen industry, you’ll need to calculate the profitability by figuring out how much “stuff” is created per work ticket (what an employee produces) accounting for pollution/resource bonuses/citizenship/etc., multiply it by the market’s selling price, account for taxes, and subtract the employee's’ wages. Keep in mind that employees are paid when they work, not when you use their productivity. If your companies become unprofitable, and you stop hitting the work button, but forget to update your employees’ salaries, they’ll continue to drain your coffers.
Sell products
Selling your finished product is actually a very slow process. Many products have a stockpile problem where there can be hundreds of thousands of units sitting on the market at the same price point for weeks. Undercutting those offers typically results in you losing your entire profit margin (however slim it may have been to begin with). You’ll need to pay careful attention to your break-even price and ensure you’re not losing money in the process. Since it does take to long for products to sell, you should have a significantly sized cash reserve for wages in the meantime while you wait. You can also export your product to other countries around the world by purchasing a market license (found on your storage page). However, most countries have extremely high import taxes, preventing you from making a profit on their marketplaces.
Storage
You’ll also need to occasionally purchase more storage space for your inventory.
Products tend to move very slowly on the markets and don’t sell very quickly. When you have offers for products to be sold on the market, the product remains in your inventory until sold. You can run out of room very quickly, preventing you from working or buying raw materials (if necessary).
A few considerations...
In eRepublik, as a result of various game mechanic changes from Admin (the people who run the game), the Return on Investment, or ROI, (the time it takes to recover the costs to create a company) is somewhere over a year for every type of industry in the game. After that year or so, you would still have only broken even and not profited anything. Additionally, the last few years have shown a relatively consistent trend of prices decreasing over time, and wages increasing which would only worsen your profit margins further.
If you manage to beat the odds and create a company that pulls a net profit, you can look to expand your company. You can create additional companies of the same type, enabling you to WAM or use work tickets more times in a day, or you can branch out, building companies of different qualities or product types. Ensure you keep a careful eye on your profitability in each market though, as there are a wide variety of problems that can arise and instantly erase your profit margin entirely, making all of your companies simultaneously unworkable.
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