Help with my auto empire please!

[therealevan]

Hi folks

I'm looking for some advice on my current game. Here's what I am working with at the moment:

I have 21 automobile retailing stores across 7 cities including a back end manufacturing division of 6 factories running near 100%.
I've hired a COO to help ease the price chasing with my stores, the COO's current salary is $24.3M annum. I also have a CMO who covers all advertising assets, their salary is $12.4M annum.
Here is my current income statement of last year:



To provide you with a better summary of market share & revenue streams, please review the following screenshots (Blue is me):





As you can see, I am dominating the motorcycle market share for retailing, however - as of right now all of my manufacturing power is dedicated into producing the top quality cars. My product chain isn't full tier, I am buying the T2 materials from other players. In otherwords, I am producing my own engines, car body, wheel & tires then finally cars.

Another highlight is my cash on hand, sitting at $408M, zero debt. Credit limit is just around $900M. The economy in game as you see has slowed, interest rates finally dropped below 8% for the first time in probably 15-20 years. Focusing a bit more on my stock, current price is at $14.31 a share. Outstanding shares are at 54M, I am not currently paying a dividend, and I am not spending anything on investor relations.

To go over some other expenses, I'm paying roughly $1.8M on public relations under the corporate branding strategy. Also I am currently not drawing a personal salary.

My only real in game objective is to remain in the automobile & motorcycle markets.

Thanks for reading my messy post, I'd appreciate any feedback/input/advice!

Evan

[counting]

Do you have inflation on? Did you buy related tech from AIs? I see you have no current running R&D expenses. Also obviously there's still more room to expand product market share. And I wonder what's the quantity of cars you sold each month per retail store.

With such competitions, personally I wouldn't dare to focus only on automobile, it's kinda risky since automobile's necessity index is very low, and revenue drops hard during recession. But this is a good challenge though. To be able to survive only on 1 product class with heavy competitions.

[therealevan]

Do you have inflation on? Did you buy related tech from AIs? I see you have no current running R&D expenses. Also obviously there's still more room to expand product market share. And I wonder what's the quantity of cars you sold each month per retail store.

With such competitions, personally I wouldn't dare to focus only on automobile, it's kinda risky since automobile's necessity index is very low, and revenue drops hard during recession. But this is a good challenge though. To be able to survive only on 1 product class with heavy competitions.

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my thread!

Inflation is turned off
I buy related tech from AI
Average car sales per store calculated to 31 (rounded)

I'm not bothering with stocking inventory levels because quality per car is constantly changing due to me buying better technology from AI or changing supply chains that impact the car quality. How should I use my COO? I have it set so my COO is managing all my stores, not sure if that's a good idea or not. I'm not really sure what they're supposed to be allowed to do.

Edit;

I see three routes I can go while still staying within the boundary of my existing external game objective.

1) I start putting cash back towards shareholders through buybacks & dividend/investor relations
2) Initiate a motorcycle production footprint by building factories dedicated to building bikes
3) Expand retailing power by adding more stores to further maximize market share for auto & bike sales.

Thoughts?

[counting]

Inflation is turned off

Well, this makes calculating cost and profit margin much easier. Although sometimes reduced normal inflation is easier on expansion.

I buy related tech from AI

This is probably best option with such heavy competition, second hand techs are quite cost effective. And Cars with many semi-products would cost a lot in R&D to research techs on your own.

Average car sales per store calculated to 31 (rounded)

This is the most weird thing about automobile stores. When the market is highly competitive each store seems to hit a sales ceiling of 32 for cars, regardless of sales unit level. In fact a level 1 sales unit can provide enough throughput of 32/month. And judging by your sales revenue, I would assume you are setting the car price quite high, and keep rating quite low. The only way to expand sales would be opening more automobile stores (if production can keep up). I had an experience that I opened more than dozens of auto-stores in one city and still not able to fully saturated that city's market share. (and literally run out of good retail locations, and had to artificially increase traffic index on empty land with new buildings to create more)

I'm not bothering with stocking inventory levels because quality per car is constantly changing due to me buying better technology from AI or changing supply chains that impact the car quality. How should I use my COO? I have it set so my COO is managing all my stores, not sure if that's a good idea or not. I'm not really sure what they're supposed to be allowed to do.

Well, car quality is heavily influences by multiple semi-products and their tech, so it's really difficult to build brand without CMO to help you, especially if you use corporate brand strategy when quality is unstable. As of COO, I would assume its most valuable feature in your situation is tuning price related to other AIs and stay competitive. And since you produce most important semi-products your own with just cars, most of COO's management features are not useful at all. Another important hidden feature COO could give you is its expertise in general. Like a manufacturing expertise can increase you manufacturing unit level. A retail expert might not be useful to you though, since retail sales unit level 1 is more than enough.