Corporation help (Little Upsilon)

how do I know if i am starting a new corporation in the right field?

As I am looking for a new corporation to build but don't know if I will make the right choice or not

You can look at the supply and demand on your world. Go to world trade menu, click on supply/demand, and look for products that are far red side. Be a little careful of this, particularly if it is in a military field. There might be a temporary shortage because some presidents are gearing up for war, and when they finish stockpiling you might have an oversupply. A couple good choices (at least on GR where I'm at) are Factory Maintenance corps and Electric corps. Every other corp uses these products, so you're usually safe with them. Search around the forum for threads on profitability, there are some tricks to maximizing your profits. Bottom line, look for products in high demand and that are used by a lot of other corps. Hope this helps a little. JMR32

Yes it does. Thank you for the help because I was going to build a new corporation for all the military stuff that were on shortages.

Glad I asked for help now or I would be in trouble in the future

I'll modify that a little bit. If you are a President, and your country can afford it, you can build a corp in your country for the military stuff and then just contract your full production directly to your country. This will help your own military out, and will keep the corp profitable. But it will also cost your country cash to buy the stuff every month, and it counts against your monthly military spending limits. I like to have some military corps in my own countries personally. I should have asked you if the corp you wanted to build was for a country or an enterprise. Sorry about that. If you do own a country the general rule of thumb is to have two corps for every million of population. Make sure you set your education priorities, that is VITAL, and it's something that the vast majority of new players ignore. In the beginning concentrate your efforts on schools, you can't produce all the managers and high tech people and hospital staff, etc. without schools. I'm assuming you're rather new, if you already knew this info just ignore me. Good luck, and I'll check back tomorrow in case you have some more questions. Or maybe someone else will jump in with some advice. JMR32

A good rule of thumb is to produce products that are in shortage--the more severe the shortage, the better.

Corollaries: Avoid food/agriculture corps and weapons corps (though ammo corps are usually more profitable).

Shortage is relative to the supply/demand situation for the product...the ratio of supply to demand, basically. A shortage of 600 hospitals is more severe than a shortage of 6 million gasoline, because hospitals are so much more difficult to build and there may only be a monthly production capacity of 300 hospitals trying to meet monthly demand for 900, whereas a shortage of 6 million gasoline with 1.4 billion produced and 1.406 billion demanded is close to equillibrium.

Look at the little red/green lines when you go to trade->products in stock or a screen that shows similar red/green bar graphs. The longer the red, the more intense the shortage.

Can I tell what corporation that I built?

On the List Corporations page (Corporations > List Corporations or click on My Corporations on the links on the left-hand side):

At the bottom of the list of corporations, corps under construction, requests from CEOs for relocations, and bids on your corps are listed.

Once a corp has been constructed, it appears in your list of corps with a star next to it to indicate that it is new. I think the star disappears after about a year.

Oh ok cool so now I know where I can see how my corporations are going.

I've seen how my new one went but not sure if it did good or not how do I kow if it went good or not?

Investigate the links under the Corporations > Manage menu, particularly the profit, cash and debt option.

Note that not all corps will turn a profit every month - some products take more than a month to be completed (such as universities which are produced at a rate of 1 per 3 months).

Look through other posts in the help forum for further advice on managing corps and setting trade strategies.

The stuff that the corporations make do they sell themselves or do I have to sell them myself?

They are usually set up to sell their produces on their own. But they are either set at best price, or time strategy (offering quite low prices) which are usually one of the downfalls for a corporation in the hands of a newbie.

To add to Angus88's post, if you click on "corporations" from your home page it will take you to a page listing all the corps in your country. On that page will be a line saying "trade strategies". Click on that and you will go to a page that lists all the corps you own and will also list (among other stuff) what the quality of the goods they produce are, and what they currently sell them for. It will also have a couple columns for your supply buying.
The game default sell setting is 10% BELOW the market price, and if you keep it there you're gonna have a hard time making any money. Where you set it is your choice, but at LEAST get market value for your goods. Most veteran players are selling for 20-30% above market or even more if the market is really tight. Play with it a little to find what works best for you. And don't freak if you see the words "some left". The best players will tell you that's where a corp SHOULD be every month for max profitability.

If the market is really dire, and this is around the case of a HUGE deficit (none of which situations are present at the moment) you can get away of charging the maximum price. As a young CEO I used the 1000+ production plant deficit (one of these is built per year by a factory) to charger for 450% for I think current market price was around the 20B mark. This fueled some rapid expansion.

My point is if you find a market situation where 600+ corporation yearly production is needed to correct the deficit, don't be afraid to get on the gravy train.

What does it mean when it say..you can nationalize this corporation?

It means "You can steal this corporation from a CEO." Not likely to make you any friends, though. And the corporation will become less productive, assuming the CEO hasn't already run it into the ground.

However, if you've got a CEO that obviously went inactive, has his corps at 10% hiring and a salary that the game auto-reduced to 60, lets his corps accumulate debt because of mismanagement, and does not respond to repeated requests to fix his corps, then nationalization might make sense to give you a chance to fix that corp. However, unless you want to make enemies, it should only be used as an extreme last resort.

I've only been playing for about a month. A couple questions on corporations:

1) Should I purchase goods my corporations need at any particular quality? I'm currently set to 150, figuring that will help the quality of my product, but I don't know if it improves the quality enough to make up for the cost.

2) I've got my corporations selling at 10% above quality of the product. Is this about right?

3) Are public state controlled corps more profitable then non-public?