Are there any official rules on this ?

A quick-and-dirty conversion from 3E, aimed only at Ritual Summoning materials, would look like this ...

Locate a candidate raw reagent site in an appropriate area (usually wilderness full of cranky paranimals surrounded by cranky border guards), takes 1 day, needs 2 successes on Intuition + Survival. Needs 3 successes for a candidate refined reagent site, 4 successes for candidate radical reagents. Needs +1 success if done without a Talislegger kit. Appropriate Allied Spirit Task can add to dice pool.

Gathering takes 30 minutes and is tested against Animal/Zoology, Herbal/Botany, Metal/Metallurgy, Mineral/Geology + Intuition. Every success results in 1 candidate raw reagent, 0.5 candidate refined or 0.33 candidate radical reagents. Appropriate Allied Spirit Task can add to dice pool. NB Animal reagents will still be "on the hoof", and may object to being harvested.

Refine raw reagents, takes 1 day. Task difficulty = number of raw reagents to be converted per batch.

Crafting Ritual Materials needs (fourxForce) refined raw reagents and a total of (Forcex2) successes. Task is against Enchanting + Magic. Roll once per day.

OK, lets test these rules by doing it industrially, and see if it breaks.

Wageslaves with Intuition 3 and Survival 3 do the base gathering. They are rolling 6 dice, and will find raw reagents in 2 days out of 3.

On a quick and dirty Monte Carlo simulation, on the four days a week our six-die-pool harvesters find something, they'll average about two and a half units on their gather check, so thats call it ten units of raw materials a week.

Note that these people do not need to be magically active, and at 100 a unit for raw materials, thats 1000 credits a week to share around the wageslaves, their corporate masters and the various people to pay off so the wage slaves can work.

An alchemist will then refine them, using a relatively cheap Assaying Kit. Assume Magic 3, Alchemy 3. Batches of 2 will be converted 65% of the time, with glitches destroying the materials once a month or so. Call it one point three raw material turned into candidate-ritual-material per day. If Alchemy Inc spotted for a 8-die-pool alchemist, it'll convert 81% of the time, for 1.6 units a day converted. If Alchemy Inc use a barely-magical, unskilled apprentice to convert 1 unit a day off a 2 die pool, he'll still convert 0.7 units a day ... so if you're Aztechnology and have a copious supply of cheap raw materials from minimally paid talisleggers, two cheap burned out mages/apprentices can replace one 8 die pool pretty competant guy with minimal loss of productivity !

Note that it is a lot easier to find someone to train as a talislegger than it is to find someone magically talented to become an alchemist. The talislegger will therefore be a heck of a lot cheaper.

Next, an enchanter will turn them into ritual materials.

Assume we are creating Force 4 materials. We therefore need 16 units of refined raw materials. This represents one and a half weeks of talislegger time, plus two weeks of alchemist time.

We will need 8 successes on Enchanting+Magic. Assume our 6 die pool Wage Mage. By the same Monte Carlo, she will average 2.5 units a day, and therefore be able to refine 16 units of refined raw materials into a force 4 ritual material in about 6 working days (btw, glitches aside, its a linear difficulty under SR4, so force six is merely twice as long as force 3 but not significantly harder).

Right, so ... the force four summoning materials takes one and a half weeks of mundane talislegger time, plus three weeks of enchanter time.

Under these 1000 nuyen per point of force doesnt look too bad - assume 1000 nuyen for the talisleggers, most of which goes in bribes to get access to the area, and 3000 nuyen to the enchanter.

However, what it doesnt provide is solid profit margins, assuming you need to pay alchemists and enchanters Middle lifestyle at Y5000 a month.

If I was Aztechnology, I would practically give away Assaying Kits, and make it clear you're always happy to trade unprocessed raw materials for refined raw materials at, say, five to one ... thus trading peon time for freelance alchemist time. Oh, and dont ever mix up the sales batches with the materials we use internally - stuff we use internally, we make internally. Stuff we get from freelancers is insecure and is sold back to freelancers.

Assaying Kits sell for Y500. Hmmmmm.

You're forgetting corp-owned housing which is payed, of course, by withholding money from the wage-slave's paycheck.

Theres some margin there, if the Corp is buying Lifestyles in bulk. However, the security to stop your reasonably hard to replace magically active talent leaving and going freelance is likely to chew into that as well ... theres some margin at the later steps, but not a *lot* of margin.

The other point is that Y1000 a point is the retail price - if we're paying Low lifestyle for our wagemages in Siberia or somewhere, then our rating-4 summoning materials has a revenue of 4000 and 2500 in costs for security, the wagemage and the talislegger and that only leaves 1500 that needs to be split between the retailer and our profits.

Theres margin there, but not a *lot* of margin.

You're also assuming that all foci are priced at minimum price. I don't think that's a reasonable assumption.

for starters, your harvesters probably specialise their skill. i'd say at least 2(+2) would be reasonable for skill in SR4 for someone who is basically only using their skill for 1 task.

secondly... while i'm sure some places get their raw materials from areas that have concepts like "minimum wage" and such, in all probability the major producers of raw materials are paying desperate people who live in the middle of nowhere in a place that doesn't care about labor laws or human rights. that will cut down those costs somewhat, quite possibly down to almost zero (the nicer corps will probably provide such niceties as clean drinking water, hovels that don't have holes in them, soap, clothes that don't have lice in them, and actual food that isn't borderline rotten to their workers as a lifestyle, i suspect... which is likely a pretty nice lifestyle for some parts of the world.

now, the mages are a little more tricky. or rather, they would be, if it had to be a mage. you can, for example, have an enchanting adept. in fact, the major producers probably spend a lot of time searching for children with magic ability to train into various areas, including as enchanting adepts. again, if you search in the parts of the world that are dirt-poor but population-rich, well... 1% sounds pretty low, until you start considering that in a city of 1 million people, you're going to have ten thousand magically active people. and there are a lot of places with a lot of people and not a lot of concern for what happens to them. i don't think middle lifestyle is too likely for the average enchanter, personally. so yeah, i'd go with your low estimate, not your middle estimate.

but then, you can also have people share lifestyles. if you have a compound, they can of course also share security costs. and, as a corporation, you aren't paying full price for anything, including the lifestyles you give your employees. sure, it's 1k/month for a shadowrunner to get low lifestyle, but it probably only costs a large corp maybe 700 or less to produce that lifestyle (for a true megacorp, it's probably dramatically less). and, as a corp, they can take the long view; iirc it's 100 times the lifestyle to get it permanently in game terms, so shell out 70k credits and after ~8.5 years, your lifestyle costs just disappeared.

also, the corporations that handle gathering probably don't have to bribe anyone to access land... most likely, they own the land.

oh, and also... making 1500 of profit on every 5,000 is not a bad profit margin in the first place. when was the last time you got ~30% interest on your money?

Also note that you did math for one week... try expanding the math for a month. I don't think they'd pay out weekly or by volume.