Sadko hyper-specializes in transporting bulk goods across the solar system. Even though Sadko Transport came last to The Contract and employs the least number of people, their motto accurately reflects their role: The Blood of the Solar System.
History
Sadko is the only one of the Big Four that did not exist prior to The Contract. Sasha Sadko, a Russian plutocrat, created the company after Qinlin Mining decided not to conduct its own shipping. Sadko gave Ephemeris Engineering a significant deposit to purchase multiple vessels, giving Ephemeris critical seed money as it expanded. As a result, Sadko receives a significant discount on all ships bought.
Corporate Organization and Culture
Sadko provides exactly one service: interplanetary transport. It outsources all maintenance and service activities to L2H. As a result, it keeps an extremely small footprint in the Solar System, despite its disproportionate control over commerce.
Sadko maintains its headquarters in St. Petersburg, Russia, and operates only two satellite facilities, one in Ceres Station and one in orbit around Io near the Ephemeris production facility orbiting the moon. More than ninety percent of its employees live and work on its vessels.
Despite the broad dispersal of its employees, Sadko maintains tight control over all of its ships and their crews. Ships are divided between short- and long-haul categories, again divided between the inner- and outer-system, making four separate divisions. But these divisions provide the only significant layer of management between the corporate headquarters and the ships themselves.
Sadko captains enjoy significant power over their vessels. Non-Sadko employees are not permitted in the operational areas, and passenger decks are kept sealed away from the main crew. Once docked, Sadko captains notoriously release their crews to the receiving stations, often resulting in significant unrest and debauchery. L2H maintains enough entertainment facilities to maintain a profit, despite the frequent vandalism and violence that may occur.
Crews become very loyal to their ships and captains. While mutinies and other shipboard unrest occur, they do so rarely, and rarer are their successes. It is not unusual for a crewmember to spend most of his or her career aboard a single vessel, but it is also not unusual for a crewmember to jump from vessel to vessel, particularly on long-haul vessels.
Monopolistic Practices
Sadko actively uses its market share to negotiate rates with all major parties. By using its history with Ephemeris and its purchase orders to keep a discount on new vessels, Ephemeris increases the cost for non-Sadko customers, thus pricing out Sadko’s competition. It also strictly enforces its contracts with L2H and Qinlin, severely sanctioning them, or even withdrawing all transport services, should the other members of the Big Four use independent transportation.
To ensure that its vessels don’t end up in use by its competitors, Sadko scuttles aging ships, either by tearing them down or sending them towards the sun. As a result, there is a very limited second-hand market for Ephemeris ships.
These monopolysitic practices generate significant tensions among the Big Four. While Qinlin, Ephemeris, and L2h conduct business dealings at arms’ length with each other, they each reluctantly maintain relationships with Sadko. Most notably, L2H failed, some say intentionally, to pass on its Sadko obligations to its sub-contractors. This allows certain suppliers and service providers working for L2H at multiple stations to use the handful of privately-owned vessels shipping among the system.
The Ahai and the Corporate War
The introduction of the Ahai into the careful balance between the Big Four negatively impacted Sadko to a large degree. As its profits rely heavily on the cost of carrying goods over extended periods of time, the use of wormholes impacted Sadko’s bottom line. Further, the insistence of the Ahai to rely on independent shippers created the first significant competition to Sadko’s choke-hold on inter-planetary transport.
While it has never been confirmed, the evidence indicates that the initial attacks against Ephemeris and independent shippers that sparked the Corporate War happened at Sadko’s direction.