Office space

[colonel_truman]

FUTURE:
I plan to put an end to this story by 2020, unless I change my mind later. I like playing this game a lot, and like even more to narrate about it.
I thought before that maybe some of you would like to follow the progress by getting the save games, but unfortunately, as you well know, the game is constantly being upgraded and my current version is too old to do something about it. So I try my best to offer a "useful" picture. I´m also sure I leave some aspects that I might deem irrelevant unanswered. I cannot show every piece of the puzzle in the reports so I have to judge and discriminate about the information offered. If you happen to have a different angle to it, or are interested in me shedding light on dark corners, write about it. As I always say, feel free to comment and offer advice and guidance.

If someone would like to set up goals or is interested in watching a specific outcome for this story, to your liking, amusement or just because of curiosity, please let me know. It could be akin to be on the board of directors of Tomahawk Corp. I.E. Want to see a subsidiary sale, say it!

Finally, It´s been almost four months since last post. I think I´ll find the time to finish this before year-end
So, I´ll speed up the game reports jumping from 2012 now to 2016 and then 2020.
Thanks for reading!

[colonel_truman]

FEBRUARY 2016

FINANCES

Our assets have grown by 7,5 billion$ in the past four years, to 22,7billion$. Of that, 2,5billion$ were amortized, so we reduced substantially both our liabilities and the interest charged therein.
As we have been getting enough cash on a monthly basis, from our business operations, for our investing activities (most of the time), we now find the corporation very well positioned to monetize back our assets if the situation so requires, with the revolving facility having 11 billion$ "available" as we speak.

Balance sheet-feb2016.png (581.28 KiB) Viewed 13348 times

We can see that the profits from our RE firms stand at present at about 1,3billion$/year.
You will also notice that we have increased our R&D expenses substantially (a 40% increase since 2012), meaning we have built many new R&D facilities to keep filling the gaps in our research.

Income Statement-feb2016.png (487 KiB) Viewed 13348 times

As it´s been customary, we now present the two pictures for the Stock Market review.

Stock Market-feb2016.png (538 KiB) Viewed 13348 times

We can see that Tomahawk is now valued in the marketplace at 1,4 times its assets. That puts us on a similar value range compared to other public corporations (see stock market triptych).
We also see that we haven´t yet required private capital investments nor have tried to buy back our shares.

Stock Market2-feb2016.png (529.08 KiB) Viewed 13348 times

Here we show how we finally acquired the computer corporation Victory Group (we currently own 98,15% of it). You will also see that we increased our ownership in Fusion Corp. (furniture).
We fired the CEOs of both corporations and purchased their shares once they were out, in 2015.
As we do not plan to increase further our ownership, let´s see the total costs of the acquisitions:
Fusion: average purchase price of 11$ for 30,97mm shares: 341mm$.
Victory G: average purchase price of 7,83$ for 63,8mm shares: 500mm$

It seems these numbers (from the stock exchange menu) don´t add the "private" purchases to the equation. If we do so:
Fusion: "public" purchases 284mm$ + "private" purchases 359mm$ = 643mm$
Victory: "public" purchases 446mm$ + "private" purchases 126mm$ = 572mm$
(Edit: correct numbers now)

Next, we updated the Stock Market Triptych for 2016.
As we explained in a previous post how this worked, we won´t do it again. Nevertheless, it comes simplified this time, and with an "enhanced" valuation metric to take into account earnings (right side).

Stock Market Triptych Public-2016.png (73.53 KiB) Viewed 13348 times

Also, as we wanted to know the market cap of the corporations not under our control, we excluded FUS and VIC from the triptych chart.
Then we thought it would be a better idea to add them to our subsidiaries in a new chart, dubbed "Sylvania´s Corporate Market", and then compare both groups (Simulating we´d IPO our subsidiaries making 20% of their shares available in the market).
So here´s the result, showing the whole of the nation´s corporate market.
We can see that assets not under our control amount to 22,5 billion$ and are currently priced at a premium of 8 billion$.

Sylvania´s Corporate Market-2016.png (75.96 KiB) Viewed 13334 times

Edit: Changed, wrong inputs.

[colonel_truman]

TECHNOLOGY.

We have slightly improved our tech chart to accommodate leading corporations inside it and also have included the technology ratio for each finished product. We too dropped the tobacco products from the list.

Techno chart-feb2016.png (48.51 KiB) Viewed 13327 times

The lead space, if empty, means we are leading. If in bright blue means one of our subsidiaries has the leading product technology.
To summarize here, we are lagging (broadly) in:
Toys.
Leather&footwear.
Household products.

Toys: As shown in the Stock Market picture, we are investing by steps in the two toy producing corporations (Mankind and Tricubic). Both are feeling snug from their dominant position in their respective specialty product: the one in handheld consoles, the other in video game consoles. Our plan here will be to keep parking some of our surplus money in these, up until we get 50% of their stock and then buy the blueprints and start developing the products ourselves, without participating directly in the retail market. As we have already seen some other players probing the field, we´ll keep an open eye in case the competition turns rough, in which case we will become net sellers. Only if we could take the lead in the technology we´d create our own brand of toys.

Leather&Footwear: In this case, both industries are split between two existing types of products: one with enhanced, saleable characteristics and another type that will require some improvements before an acceptable retail product could be produced (bags&briefcase + socks&sports vs. belst&wallets + sandals&shoes).
We´ll review this sector later on.

Household products: We´ll try to focus one of the universities into this category, choosing the one (Lynden) where our subsidiary Tidy Mart Inc. has its three R&D labs, before we set up our own.

Special Items: Digital Cameras; Smartphones; Netbooks and Tablet computers; Camcorders and Portable media players: Either us or our subsidiaries have the lead in this important range of electronic products, have the intention to keep it that way, and are also currently engaged in retailing them.

Finally: We decided to re-enter the cosmetics field through 4 new R&D labs in Funk, as the population and their purchasing power have grown considerably since last time we tried.
So, we will assess the possibility of creating a new subsidiary to focus on these products after we conduct a small "field" study.

REAL ESTATE.

We built 57 new apartment buildings and 17 new office buildings since 2012, having now a total of 219 and 148 buildings respectively through the nation. Our new "isolated" residential areas plan is having mixed results, as most of the new firms sprouting around these are research labs.
As it seems the process will take longer than expected, we will provide screenshots of the landscape in our next review. But yes, there are some retail stores already spicing up the new neighborhoods.

CITIES.

We regained Lynden´s City Hall and had the opportunity before the elections to shuffle around the candidates of our political party. We needed Flemming Muns to direct our computer subsidiary (He was one of the Mayors) so we had to fund another candidate from scratch. Total campaign costs were about 100mm$, provided by Rock Smelters Inc.

Management: Back in 2012 we decided to run deficits so the cities would burn through their cash reserves. We did this by lowering taxes a bit but mostly through increasing the number of public facilities (esp. education). As we want to adopt a comprehensive policy now we decided to create a brand new chart to guide us through, as a new toolbox.
The data is from the 2015 budget.

Tax Rates-2016.png (53.54 KiB) Viewed 13327 times

As you can see, only Lambs Grove is showing a surplus with the current tax rate, and that just because of the land SALES income (not land tax, 438mm$, twice the norm).

We thought the first step should be to assess the money that the city could GRAB, and from there decide what tax rate would make the current budget break even.
Then we decided to create two projections considering the breakeven number: RATE B (social) & RATE C (liberal). For now we will stick to the first.
We too considered to make the income&jobs category (in the living standard) to go from the current 80-something to 100 (max.). To do so we should lower current income taxes just a bit.
In that case the closer round number would be a 20% income tax. From that figure come the other two: increase consumer taxes to the 20% max. and from there we infer that the corporate profit tax should move to the 30s%.

With such a policy we see Funk and Glen Fork incurring deficits, Lambs Grove and Lynden surpluses. But, we haven´t considered land sales, and as long as there are some we think the budget will be OK.
Consequences: we will try to monitor the effect this new policy will bring on corporations, as the consumer tax will affect retail sales, and the profits tax will supposedly reduce private investments. A change in valuations will probably have some benefits.
On the other hand, we will use the surplus (esp. in Lambs Grove) to further increase the education budget.

Finally, we wont carve these rates into stone, and will probably come up with somehow lower taxes.

[colonel_truman]

TEXTILE INDUSTRY:

We have tried to created a picture that would give the most information with the less inputs, so we ´re going to focus on what we think are the strategic mistakes and strenghts of every one of the players. It will be a small summary of what we see here.

TEXTILE PLAYERS.png (719.05 KiB) Viewed 13275 times

Mistakes:

1- COTTON THREAD: They are involved in manufacturing microchips and the lot, in size! Probably because of the predesigned layout factory plans? We indicated them to close down unprofitable firms.
2- PUR TREASURY: As they´re small and focused, the CEO "forgot" to buy 50,01% of the company shares and so they became part of our holding emporium, when they could be independent.
3- RADIATE STAR: They have lost their purpose of being a tech company as they have directed their resources massively towards farming. That gives them size but makes them less profitable. Also, the CEO doent´s have research skills, so it will be easy to dislocate them from their tech leading position in footwear goods (by finding a good research project director?).
4- MOON HARP: They too have massed their resources towards farm production, and a few resource-extraction facilities, so they find themselves losing half their profits to the banks.

Now to the strenghts:

1- COTTON THREAD: They are researching 12 of the possible 12 consumer products, with a qualified CTO (40 skill, leather), and focus on retailing aggressively.
2- PUR TREASURY: They are efficient, and have decent tech potential.
3&4- They will get in the long run good quality raw materials (leather, wool etc.), and these are as important as technological advances for the textile class products.

In a nutsell, it seems tech vs raw materials.

Observations:
We lead in profits, so we´ll grow bigger, faster that our opponents, for now.
There are imbalances between farm-semis materials and consumer-goods factory production (farm overproduction). There are also imbalances between consumer-goods factory production and retailing capacity (low retail infrastructure).
Cotton Thread aspires to dominate the full spectrum of the industry.
Our opponents are big size/low profit, and are "big caps" (too expensive to purchase, but not out of reach).
In January 2017 our 3-year textile-research investment will bear fruit and we will have the lead in sandals, shoes, wallets and belts (We started it at the beginning of 2014). Most of that market share is still dominated by the local producers.

NEW VENTURES:

After checking semi-product supply, local producers quality and our current tech level, we think we could run a cosmetics focused corporation succesfully.
For that we will need 500mm$ and an enterprising CEO.

Also, maybe a retail-focused subsidiary will do some good. It could help some struggling factories to deploy their merchandise.
In our "field" trip we found that many factories are big size, and that many products can´t make it to the shelves as fast as required.
We´ll need another 500mm$ and a CEO with good retail skills, and we will manage personally the location of the stores, as we want to test a 6x6 retail mall comprised of 4 department stores grouped together. We´ll leave the CEO to decide about the stuff to sell and the price tags.

OLD VENTURES.

We made available in our last post a chart that covered how our subsidiaries are currently getting along (quite well, thank you).
We also suggested that an IPO wouldn´t be off the table, as it could help Tomahawk keep some dry powder for big purchases later on, in case one of our creatures might need extra cash to run the business.
So, we used the "Corporate Market" chart and inserted a column to compare the possible money raised for each subsidiary to find out which one would benefit the most.
Probably, one good gauge would be to divide earnings to equity. We did so (far right) and found the following:
1-The ones with a ratio of 0,1 get good MC/EQ valuations.
2-Beyond that, exponentially good MC/EQ valuations.
3-Below that, it doesn´t matter if they lose money as it is the same MC/EQ ratio.

Hmm.

IPO-current val..png (40.54 KiB) Viewed 13275 times

Well, we stopped there, but not before we´d check what a MC=EQ valuation would do to the quantity of money raised (maybe a good valuation for recession times?). We call it dollar for dollar IPO, as one cash dollar would give private investors one dollar worth of equity, regardless of earnings (just experimenting).
As the issue price is the same (10$) the variable is quantity of shares. Then EQ=MC, and so S=MC/P.
Result: They would get less than half the money from the current system.

IPO-$4$.png (34.64 KiB) Viewed 13275 times

From there we devised an ideal plan, more to our liking, where earnings mattered more and money losing operations would get much lower private investment.
Also, we thought of some way to make the IPO price different from 10$ for each corporation (depending on their level of success) without dropping the idea of having an E/EQ ratio, so we reached the "enhanced" formula: P=((E/(0,1*EQ))+1)*10
From there you get the MC: MC=EQ*P*0,1 or MC=EQ*10E
Then you get the quantity of shares to issue (if 20% issuance), and all the other ratios.
Just throwing numbers at an excel.... and correct me if wrong.
Here are the results:

IPO-Adjusted.png (37.5 KiB) Viewed 13275 times

[colonel_truman]

BEFORE WE CONTINUE....

I forgot to mention that we created a new subsidiary for the sport equipment field: Archer Sport&Fitness Ltd. with 250mm$ as starting capital. Est. 2014.
We don´t have very high expectations for these folks, but we thought it was worth to give it a try.

Alright, let´s see what we´ve done just after reporting and before we start playing the next period:
1-Changed taxes: finally we opted for a 15-20-25 tax instead of a 20-20-30.
2- Increased Immigration cap to max.
3- Changed university research focus globally, esp. Household products in Lynden, and stopped the focus in Funk (temporarily).
4- Built a few public facilities, changed the budget in others.
5- Created 2 new subsidiaries: Le Chandeliere Stores Ace HELP Products Ltd. (cosmetics) and The Four Corners Mall (pure retailer).

new ventures-feb2016.png (29.15 KiB) Viewed 13250 times

The Mall has already 16 department stores and enough land to build 16 more.

The 4 corners MALL.png (880.59 KiB) Viewed 13250 times

5- Hired a CTO for 45mm$/year (Mr. Fandango) with a research skill of 40, and had to re-start most of the research projects so the CTO´s skill was reflected in the final numbers.
6- IPO´d Tidy-Mart, Buzzard Automotive and Saratoga Mills, for the following reasons:

a) Both Tidy-Mart and Buzzard were good enough to IPO despite losing money, as we indicated.
b) Saratoga Mills invests a lot in new production facilities and so after earnings is usually "cash flow neutral".
c) All needed quite some cash to purchase our latest technology.

The money raised can be found in our last post inside the "Current Valuations IPO".
We then sold 5% of their shares to raise some cash ourselves and still keep our interest at 75%.

7- Sold our most recent tech to the subsidiaries that most needed it; Purchased smarphone, digital camera and tablet computer technology and added R&D labs for these.
8- Finally, our debt increased to 2 billion$ (give or take) after the adjustments.

Finally, a couple of comments:
a) We didnt talk about interest rates this time: As lower rates didn´t materialize as expected, we decided to err on the side of prudence about our liabilities book. Also, we decided not to purchase extra land, but that will change if we find the cities struggling financially.
b) We are doing everything we can think of to boost Sylvania´s growth by monetizing our properties and using the cash to set up performing businesses, but we have been witnessing a decrease in the rate of national economic growth, esp. in Lynden these past years where the conservative party was managing the city.
As the mechanics of the game are hidden, we can just say that expenditures in the public sector, private sector and overall consumption are not growing as fast as before.
We´ll see if a recession ensues in the not too distant future or if we will enter into a period of sustained, albeit lower, growth.

slowdown.png (57.85 KiB) Viewed 13250 times

Regards.

[colonel_truman]

FEBRUARY 2020.

NATION:

Alright, first thing we want to find out if our new tax policies have affected the economy of the nation, and how. To recap here: we increased the consumer tax from a low of 3% to 15%, tried to lower the income tax below 20% (and failed) and increased the corporate tax to a flat 25%. We kept these rates more or less unchanged for 4 years from 2016 to 2020.

KNOWNS AND UNKNOWNS:
a) The first outstanding change was lower inflation, from 6,2% to 4,8%. At the same time the central bank increased interest rates twice, from 9,5% to 10,5%. That much now we know.
b) We must assume that the higher 15% consumer tax caused the inflation to drop, because our limited linear thinking says higher taxes mean higher prices, so lower spending?
So, were consumers spending less at the stores?
c) We also must assume that a higher corporate tax affected private investments negatively.
So, were corporations spending less in expanding their businesses?

To answer b) and c), we had to create a new chart, showing yearly changes in the GDP components.
The black vertical line marks the start of the period. Let´s see:

gdp yoy-feb2020.png (319.36 KiB) Viewed 13072 times

CONSUMER SPENDING (orange line) OBSERVATIONS: (forever increasing, always above zero)
a) You will remember that we were wondering about future growth when we finished playing the last period (feb. 2016, see the "slowdown" chart). Now we can see that the GDP% drop was due to a drop in consumer spending between 2015-2016 exclusively.
b) It seems that our 2016 investment in public facilities (yellow line) boosted consumer spending, to our surprise!
Another explanation for this YoY increase would simply be a normal recovery from already low levels, meaning what consumers didn´t spend during 2015 they spent during 2016. BUT, we don´t find such a strong peak anywhere else in the chart. The real reason might be hiding inside the retail stores world, but we can´t think of a method to evaluate that option in any meaningful way.
At least this time around, and lacking a better explanation, we´ll stick with public investment helping consumer spending.
c) We can see consumer spending still growing between 2018-2020, but about 10% less than the average.
To summarize: Did higher taxes affect consumer spending? It seems they did, albeit modestly.

CORPORATE GROWTH (blue line) OBSERVATIONS:
a) Judging from the private investment component going down since its relative peak in 2016 we can assume that corporations were placing some of their investments on hold during this period because of our higher taxes.
To summarize: Corporate expenditures are still growing, but less than before. Higher corporate taxes somehow restrain AI corporations from expanding.
In retrospect, we should have pushed it further and set rates at 30% as we planned.

We could try to assert our findings from another angle...
As the lower part of the chart is not very visible, we´ll show you another chart! This time we threw in city land sales to the mix (yellow line).
As corporations must buy land to build new factories we infer that we should see lower land sales since 2016.

private investm vs land-feb2020.png (274.22 KiB) Viewed 13072 times

We have global land sale gross values on the right side.
You will notice that corporate growth follows quite neatly land purchases.

Finally, we made a third chart, where land sales are mixed in with city budget balances.
In these we can observe:
a) Where the budget was deficitary, in each city: We can see that 2009 was the year we decided to run budget deficits, except in Glen Fork where that took place two years later.
b) The gap between land sales and budgetary equilibrium (ideally, land sales better not be used to fund day-to-day expenses, in our humble opinion): Where both lines converge above zero, the city is properly taxed to run surpluses without abusing from asset selling. Later on we find big gaps between the lines, and on top of that budget deficits (blue line below zero), meaning the cities were undertaxed and burning cash fast, and so were "abusing" from the sale of their valuable assets.
Remember we have a way to prevent land sales through the urban planning toolbox.
c) Probably the worst case would be to have the orange line permanently below zero, as that would mean businesses leaving the city, with predictably dire consequences.
There have been a few years in which that situation happened, albeit sporadically, in some of the cities. In any case I´ll leave that piece to our brave and idle readers, if they please.

CITY BUDGETSvsLAND SALES.png (532.94 KiB) Viewed 13072 times

How could we, corporate managers, do without statistics and a few charts!

[colonel_truman]

Note before we continue:
We did some thinking about the jump in consumer spending that happened during 2016 and we can provide an alternative account: We lowered the income tax temporarily to between 16-18% as we tried to achieve a 100 rating in the income&jobs. That MIGHT have put some extra cash inside people´s pockets which they diligently spent inside the stores.
We´ll keep this in mind.

Now to our corporation.

FINANCES.

As we mentioned before, we noticed both a drop in inflation and an increase in interest rates early on. We then decided to get rid of our remaining debt, without making that our priority, and finished the process in early 2018.
In the Balance sheet you will notice that we currently have zero outstanding debt, but that we have made use of the revolving facility from time to time, mainly to purchase stocks in bulk when cheap.
You will also notice the huge increase (58%) in the value of our assets, from 22,5 to 35 billion$, and that the main component of these are stocks, for the first time (about 60% of the total).

Balance sheet-feb2020.png (571.4 KiB) Viewed 12633 times

Our net income increased by 19% to 1,5 billion$/year.
Also, our R&D expenses have increased as we built a few extra labs.

Income Statement-feb2020.png (471.12 KiB) Viewed 12633 times

The stock Market price is nearing 17k$/share and the over-valuation is still close to the average of the nation at 1$ real asset for 1.37$ in the market.

Stock Market-feb2020.png (484.8 KiB) Viewed 12633 times

In the stock ownership menu you will see the outcome of our market-dealing with the toy corporations: We decided to sell Tricubic Space and buy Mankind.

First of all Mankind had more share % available for purchase than Tricubic.
Second, and most important, at one point Mankind decided to buy the videogame console technology from Tricubic and started producing and selling their own product.
To us that meant two things:

a) A (temporary) lower stock price for Mankind and a higher stock price for Tricubic.
b) A future market share loss and lower profit margins for Tricubic´s only consumer item.

Once that was clear, we decided to make haste: Acquired 50,1% of Mankind, sold all our Tricubic claims, purchased both toy technologies from our new "subsidiary" and directed our R&D department to enhance the designs.
After a while, we decided to increase further our ownership in Mankind as much as we could, as the price was still cheap. At this moment all shares in Mankind are "private", so we ought to spend 250mm$ extra to get the ownership to 75%, in case we wanted to place them fully inside our orbit, and so be able to dictate management.
Anyway, we could always sell the stock and use the proceeds to start our own subsidiary from scratch.

Another purchase in this period has been Samurai Trinity, one of the two existing investment corporations.
Having 50,1% of their stock allows Tomahawk to purchase their portfolio at market prices (no premium asked).
If we´d aim to achieve control over the whole lot of the corporations these investment players are a key step.
We´ll talk briefly about that possibility in another post.

Stock Market2-feb2020.png (492.51 KiB) Viewed 12633 times

Finally, you will notice some of our subsidiaries in the menu:
As we had enough idle cash starting 2018 we decided to purchase some of their shares when cheap, with a view to sell them later if demand appears.
Tidy-Mart is finally showing a profit while Buzzard keeps losing money.

We also did an IPO for our Gazette in late 2016:

THE ADVERTISEMENT INDUSTRY:

The Sylvania´s Business Gazette summary:
1-Starting with one newspaper in each city, a 2008, 10% ad market share provided us with 60-65mm$ income.
2-In 2010, as the profits had increased, we decided to expand our operations: by purchasing a cheap private TV station and building four radio stations, plus another newspaper purchased in 2011. Our aim was to gain extra market share. This expansion proved fruitless.
3-From 2010 until 2016 our Gazette still held a positive revenue. We waited to see if our manager would sell or close any of the non-performing firms, but didn´t.
4-Finally, in 2016 we purchased Hyper Power´s TV station in Lambs Grove for 400mm$, as we had access to capital and were hungry for yield (when money is cheap performing businesses are dear!): We had 5 year savings plus the money raised in the IPO.

We´ll show two charts to explain the evolution of the industry: one related to corporate expenditures and the other to publisher´s income.

The first merely expands upon the chart that we published in our previous ad industry report.
1-We can see a steep decline in corporate ad expenditures just after our landing, as publishers kept slashing their prices because of the extra competition.
2-In 2012 and again in 2016 total expenses increased because of new corporations created.
3-Finally we have a spending binge in 2019 as we witnessed two AI mergers (their brand gets all messed up).
4-You will notice that our subsidiaries spent less than the "public" corporations: the yellow line decreases as their brand-building kind of "ends", not so with the orange line. That´s because we limit the sectors where our creatures expand, so their brand tends to be cheaper and in some cases more stable.

AD expenses-feb2020.png (228.43 KiB) Viewed 12633 times

The second shows who got the money pie. We added total expenditures (green line) to give a better perspective.
1-Blue line are city publishers, orange AI publishers and yellow our Gazette.
2-We can see how we took off in 2017 thanks to Hiper Power´s TV station. That gave us our current 30% market share, with 210mm$ profits, while depriving our "competitors" (AI) from a valuable source of income.
3-Finally, city publishers command a neat 50% of the market share.

AD income-feb2020.png (170.97 KiB) Viewed 12633 times

[colonel_truman]

TECHNOLOGY.

Here´s the updated tech chart.

Tech chart-feb2020.png (48.1 KiB) Viewed 12044 times

We still lack leadership in the household products category. The competitiveness rating in Lynden has been increasing for the last four years, but it didn´t reach a satisfactory level until recently (and we forgot about it altogether).
A test confirmed we could bring the rating of these items 100 points up in two years with our new CTO in charge of the research projects.
Also, we still lack leadership in three miscellaneous products: sport shoes; corn flakes; toy cars.
For the rest of the consumer products, eiher us or one of our controlled corporations have the tech edge.

Finally, we decided to start accepting any tech purchase request from any corporation, and also to stop forcing our subsidiaries to acquire the latest product designs coming from our labs, for two reasons:
1-We hope this will help increase competition between producers. We´d also monitor the tech buyers in order to spot early any potential candidate to invest in the future.
2-We decided to let our CEOs evaluate the cost-reward ratio for themselves; also, to keep their books truer to their business operations, as a whole industry product tech purchase can run into their yearly revenues, and somehow blur their true profitability.

CORPORATE MARKET.

Here´s a summary of the players, divided in two camps.
The ones in light blue are our public "subsidiaries" (more than 50% ownership).
Notice we regained control of Funk Apartment Holdings, as Samurai Trinity Corp. had a controlling interest there.

Corporate market-feb2020.png (78.96 KiB) Viewed 12044 times

This chart not only allows us to see how our subsidiaries and "competitors" fare, but also tells us how much we control and how much is left outside our control (at the bottom). We can see that we currently control 93% of net revenues and 75% of the market cap.
The 25% market cap. ouside our control amounts to 28,6 billion$, so about 14,3 billion$ cash would be required to get these players under our sphere, and 21,5 billion$ under managerial dictate.
If we take a look at our credit facility we see we have 17billion$ available to borrow. If we´d take a 14,3 billion$ loan, at current rates, we´d have to pay 1,5 billion$/year in interest. That´s a possibility, as our current income is about the same...

Revolving facility-feb2020.png (72.17 KiB) Viewed 12044 times

Obviously, we wouldn´t borrow all at once and so the interest payments would be much smaller.
Also, we could reach out to private investors, to raise some cash through new stock issuance, or sell them part of our privately owned subsidiaries. Let´s see:
In the first case we think we could raise about 500 million$/year, so it would take some time (share issuance has restrictions in the game). We´d add that to our 1,5 billion$ yearly income to make 2 billion$ cash every year for stock purchases.
In the second our subsidiaries would raise about 3,6 billion$ and we´d sell 5% of our ownership for 900 million$ (4,5 billion$ instant cash). We´d then use some of our subs. to purchase the stock of the other players.
We should add here 3,5 billion$ in cash reserves our subs. currently have, so the "purchase chest" would add up to 8 billion$ cash.

[colonel_truman]

I´d like to post a few images of the cities, but I´m afraid this page´s current weight is too big and it might load slowly for some users, so I´ll wait until a new page is added in the post for that.
In the meantime, as a quick post, I´ll publish a few small charts in two groups, about our corporation, using the data I´ve been gathering with open office.

In the first group: we have number of buildings added to the nation by us, then our income vs debt and finally asset growth in two (three) categories, all since 2000.

tomahawk charts1-2020.png (406.15 KiB) Viewed 11946 times

Then we decided to give it a try and evaluate the efficiency of our investing genius (ehem) through two charts.

Tomahawk´s roa&roa^-1 - 2020.png (223.26 KiB) Viewed 11946 times

1- First we have Return on assets (ROA), meaning how much cash we got related to the value of our assets, each year.
As you might understand, stock purchases don´t carry an income attached but these count as assets, so we used one line using all our assets and a second using our "income bearing land assets" (RE firms). Logically, ROE keeps falling in the first case as our income cannot keep pace with our stock purchases.

2- A better approach in our opinion would be to know how well we have invested our income, or how much bang for the buck we have been getting.
For this we just flipped the ROA formula upside down, and considered (asset increase - debt increase) / last year´s income.
Then we can see how many dollars of asset increase were achieved this year against just one dollar of last year´s income (should we say $ylvanor?).
And forgive me in advance if I missed something in this back of the envelope approach.

We can see that in 2006 we did some bad investments that paid just 0,75 cents for each dollar in 2007;
Around that period we barely managed to protect our corporation against inflation, getting one-to-one$;
In recent years the investment in stocks has been paying a nice "dividend" indeed (in 2020 we get 2,79$ for each dollar invested in 2019).
Finally, the chart shows the year record a bit misplaced to the left.

Now to the averages (2000-2020):
Average offices built per year: 4,95
Average apartments built per year: 9,89
Average income growth: 7,3%
Average assets growth: 8,25%
Average pop. growth: 160k nationwide.
Average ROA (ex. stocks): 9,97%
Average ROA^-1: 1,59$

Thanks for reading.

[therealevan]

Colonel_truman,

I just had a chance to read your reports.... what a thorough and excellently written analysis of your game so far. Are you still actively playing this save by chance? I look forward to further updates.


Evan