What was an LNVT's Profit Margin?

Comparing Craig Smith's sales invoice on hull#34 with the data in Admiralty Ltd.'s ledger provides an insight into the LNVTs pricing structure. From the ledger, see table below, we know that the wholesale amount invoiced to the broker for hull#34 was $82,038.10. We also know the retail amount, invoiced from the broker to the owner, was $91,104. The $9,065.90 difference between the invoices is the broker's commission. All told this tug had roughly a 20% margin; 10% ($8,735.40) went to Admiralty and another 10% ($9,065.90) went to the broker—also Admiralty in this case. Thanks go to both Sally Seymour and John Howell for helping this analysis come to fruition.

A word on nomenclature; Admiralty Ltd.'s ledger contains a column titled 'Cash Sales'. The values in the 'Cash Sales' column are the amounts invoiced to brokers. As such 'Cash Sales' is synonymous with wholesale price.

The relationship between Admiralty Ltd. and Cruising Yachts is as follows: Admiralty Ltd. and Cruising Yachts were wholly owned by Loren and Lani Hart. Admiralty Ltd. was an import trading company that wholesaled Lord Nelson yachts. Cruising Yachts acted as a broker buying Lord Nelson's from Admiralty Ltd. and then selling them at retail.

Here's an interesting aside, of the 52 tugs listed in the ledger, the 'Cash Sales' sales amount (i.e. the amount invoiced to the broker) equaled the sum of the expenses allocated to each hull in all but 7 cases. For those 7 tugs the 'Cash Sales' sale amount exceeded the allocated expenses by anywhere from $500 to $5,500. Admiralty Ltd.'s allocated expense categories for each hull were: Profit, Interest, Insurance, Line of Credit bank Charge, Design, Freight, Yard, Options & Equipment.

What does it mean when the ledger lists freight costs of between $6,500 and $11,000 for 22 of the tugs and $0 for 30 tugs? A simple answer is that if Admiralty Ltd. didn't pay the freight costs, then either their in-house brokerage, Cruising Yachts, or their customer did. To do an apples-to-apples comparison on LNVT costs here in the US, 22 of the ledger's 'Cash Sales' prices need to be adjusted to include freight. A freight value can be interpolated from known freight costs from tugs shipped at about the same time and to the same destination. Adding the 'Cash Sales' price to the calculated freight costs will yield a Freight Adjusted Cash Sales Price.