therealevan wrote:
1) Guess I'll leave my retailers alone, is it worth to expand my retailing footprint?
2) Is it worth to start manufacturing tablet PCs and output into a warehouse to be branded with no output coming from the warehouse? In theory, once demand arrive, my tablets will have a greater brand rating.
3) The retailer I have the stake in actually has no business with me, I bought them out simply "because i could". I'm interested in turning them into a profitable business, and at one point they were profitable until the economy entered a recessionary state.
1) It depends on your preference I suppose. Normally I don't like to squash all opponents, but allowing them to thrive. The more you cooperate with AIs the more likely they can survive. If you wish to go head-to-head against AI at retails, it certainly is a viable strategy. A lot of times it's even a good strategy to use AI retailers with just a few of your own outlets setting the price and rating, against a common competitor with just its own retails. It's more effective than just your own retails. However under lower AI expertise, the advantage of borrowing AI's unfair expertise is less of a concern, and you generally need your own outlets for all your products. Where AI can hardly keep up players expansion speed.
2) From your descriptions I'd say you use unique brand for each product, right? So it is viable to build up the brand awareness before hitting the market. Whether this is worth or not, depends on a lot of factors, like CPM of the cities' media, whether you owned them, how good of a quality of your tablet, what's the raw cost and how many cash do you have in reserved (per-branding without selling would damp your cash quite hard, if you don't own medias, and wish to gain awareness quickly), even inflation settings. Whether or not the increased selling price thus profit margin can outweigh the initial brand investment really isn't that clear without proper cost analysis. BTW, if you use corporate or ranged brand, then you don't need to worry about this.
3) Well, in that case, your "investment" strategy isn't quite sound as I can see you lost a lot in net profit from massive negative stork returns. Either way, there's no point setting dividend payout ratio to a subsidiary when it has negative operating profit in previous year, you won't get any dividend anyway no matter how many cash it has. It's very difficult to directly influence AI's profitability. especially if its a pure retailer/real estate AI. The only way you can do is to encourage it to buy from you, if you put a warehouse close to its outlets and pray it decides to buy from you, and immediately put internal sale back on, so other AIs won't take advantage to the same supply warehouse (if you failed and others get to it first, simple cut off the link in warehouse output, remove and rebuild the output and try again). I haven't tested enough to know the new re-direct links in 2.7 beta worked well as a tool for AI assistant yet. Otherwise, it's usually best to just inject cash using "issuing share to parent company". AIs sometimes need more time to expand their businesses (sometimes might take years and they are very venerable to recession, and sometimes it will fail regardless what you do). This really isn't a well explored area in strategies, regarding assist and cooperate with AIs (There could be other ways to encourage their businesses I am not aware of). I'm still more used to squeeze profit from AIs, and rarely thinking in the opposite (and normally it would end badly for human players, if you give too much leeway for AIs)
