Introduction to Corporations

The Corporation mechanic places you in the role of a CEO of a new corporation. You will expand into one (or more) industries, set up complex supply chains to produce high-quality materials and products; hire employees to do research, produce materials and products, managers to oversee and improve the productivity of other workers and a sales team to sell your materials and products to produce a profit.

You will have the opportunity to take up to four rounds of investment in order to rapidly grow your corporation from a tiny startup in your parents garage into a world-spanning capitalist behemoth. Eventually you will take your corporation public and it's shares will be publicly traded on the stock market, and you will issue dividends to your stockholders (including yourself!) to turn your corporate profits into personal wealth.

Overview and Terminology

Corporations have a lot of moving parts, so let's start with an overview of the structure and the general terminology.

Your corporation can have many different divisions. Each division can have multiple offices, one in each city. Each office has a pool of employees which can be assigned to various roles, and a warehouse for storing input materials, output materials, boost materials and products.

Don't Panic

Running a corporation is complex and you'll need to make a lot of irreversible choices before getting feedback about whether those choices were good or bad. It is easy to paint yourself into a corner and use up all your corporate funds creating a corporation that can barely turn a profit. That may sound scary, but DON'T PANIC! No matter what happens, you can always sell your CEO position to some other sucker and start over with a new corporation! This option is available through a button "Sell CEO position" just above the "Unlocks" section in the main tab of your corporation.

How to Read this Guide

If you're completely new to corporations start with the UI and mechanics walkthrough in Chapter 1. Once you're familiar with the basic mechanics you can start thinking about automating parts of your corporation which we'll discuss in Chapter 2.

Acknowledgements

This guide wouldn't be possible without the reference manual written by CatLover I learned a ton from reading it. They have also poured a ton of time and effort into improving the Corporation mechanic and Bitburner as a whole.