[Jester's Trek] Finances
Finances
The following two pointers tickled me with how similar they are and yet at the same time how opposite they are.
This, which I've reproduced here for those who aren't able to access Dropbox, is purported to be Pandemic Legion's 2012 spending audit. It was passed around fairly widely (but with little fanfare) early last month and seems to be legitimate. While not a full budget as such, it does lay out the amount of income and expenses of a null-sec alliance with no sov costs, including an "Esoteria Project" that takes place in November. So I'm going to assume that it's the real deal.
As I said, it's not a full budget. All it includes is a summary of expenditures -- some 3.76 trillion ISK of them -- as well as a total income -- 3.79 trillion -- and a breakdown of that income by month. About 1.25 trillion ISK of the money goes to PL corporations but there's no detail provided on what that ISK is spent on. There's a separate line item for sub-cap reimbursements, but it's relatively paltry, about 315 billion ISK. 851 billion was spent on "acquisitions and assistance" for titans (485B), super-carriers (74.5B), and carriers/dreads (291.6B). The next biggest expense is "Tournament", presumably Alliance Tournament 10, on which 806 billion ISK(!) was spent.
After that, smaller amounts of ISK are spent on various expenses including 153 billion in awards, four(?) super-carrier reimbursements and one titan reimbursement. 22.5 billion was spent on the Esoteria Project, presumably on various structures like SBUs and staging POSes.
The most interesting thing to me about the audit isn't so much what the ISK is being spent on but where it's coming from. That isn't specified, only that it's monthly and that it varies wildly from 258 billion to 424 billion per month. It's likely mostly moon income.
In the A Song of Ice and Fire books on which Game of Thrones is based, each of the major Houses has "words" that are sort of a family motto. The words of House Greyjoy are "We do not sow", meaning that house has no farmers and that House Greyjoy members pride themselves on stealing what they need from those they conquer. Kind of reminds one of Pandemic Legion, doesn't it? When and if CCP does put an end to passive moon income, it will be interesting to see where PL gets the trillions of ISK they'll need to maintain the lifestyle they've become accustomed to.
Maybe they can buy Red Frog Freight and operate it as a wholly-owned subsidiary. ;-)
I've expressed my admiration for Red Frog and its various services a number of times on this blog, but never really thought that much about the finances behind the operation.
Red Frog also put out their annual report recently. And it's the total opposite of PL's audit. In this case, Red Frog laid out where their income came from: some 139,000 courier contracts worth a total of just over 1.9 trillion ISK. Their report is just as detailed in its way, providing information on everything from volume to total number of jumps -- some 1.25 million of those -- and where the contracts were coming from and where they were going. The last involves "Jita" quite a lot, as you might expect. ;-) More than a third of their contracts either originated in The Forge or ended there, or both.
They even keep track of their customers, and who of them are new customers and who are returning customers. Can targeted advertising be far behind? And Red Frog's report shows that they can boast a nearly ever-increasing volume of contracts for all of their services.
In the case of Red Frog though, while the sources of income are laid out in a great deal of detail (right down to a spreadsheet with all of the individual contracts listed), what they don't talk about are their expenses. Where does all the ISK go? The report doesn't have a word to say about the matter.
That's what tickled me about the dichotomy of these two reports: one has nothing to say about income, the other has nothing to say about expenditures. It's funny what corps in EVE want to keep secret sometimes, isn't it?
Anyway, if you're interested in this topic, have a look at both reports. There's a good bit of detail to be gleaned from them, and they do reflect the ever-increasing maturity of EVE Online alliances, as well as their ever-growing budgets. It's not just Goons and TEST making their finances public any more, and it's not just null-sec corps raking in trillions of ISK. Thank you to those of you who sent me these two pointers!
Source: Finances