You get profit from selling the goods on the next arrival of the ship. Be aware that the first ship will only bring the import goods, so you have to pay for that. Make contract with the biggest volume, and wait for the ships to bring you some money. When your relation with superpowers is high enough, search for pairs for import and export of the same goods in the trade route offers list, so that import price is a lot lower than the export price. You can sell the imported goods with the market price, meaning that it might end up in negative profit, but the relation with the superpowers will improve and deals with better rates will be shown next January.

Next, complete small import deals from the superpowers. To establish the economy with relay trading, you'd need to open at least 6 slots of trade routes. In relay trading, you do not need any economic buildings except the dock, and makes it easy to keep the population of the island very low. The profit comes from the difference of the price in the contracts you have made. Here, you import goods just like processing trade, but instead of carrying them to the factories, you just keep them at the dock and export the goods on the next ship. 'Relay Trading' is the third type of economy based on trading. Electronics Factory is not a good choice if you plan to import plastics, but if you plan to import oil and process plastics within the isle, making electronics from that will boost your profit. Textile Mill and Fashion Company will be good too, if it works using both resources (cotton and wool / cloth and leather). Plastic Plants and Pharmaceutical Companies are good examples. Because the gain of the resources is fixed, industries with low resource consumption suits well with processing trade. The ship will arrive approx 2.8 times per year, meaning 2800 units of raw materials can be earned through imports every year. You can increase the budget of the dock, issue advanced boat services edict or build the Moai Heads wonder to do that. On the other hand, increasing the frequency of the arrivals of ships works. This means that you can't increase the amount of imports simply by building docks. The amount of goods each ship carries decline when you build additional docks so that you get 1000 when you multiply the amount per single carries by number of docks you have. Freight ship will carry 1000 units of the goods on each arrival as long as you have only one dock in the island. First, make a import contract for your desired goods. The method of processing trade is simple, but needs a little calculation. Another merit of processing trade is that you would not need to care any longer about the fertility of the soil, climate of the land, and the abundance of underground resources. You can keep the population of the island low, needing less medical, religious, and entertainment buildings. This is not small because these buildings tend to require more workers then industrial buildings based on the amount of the product. One is that you don't need the plantations and mines any more. Although the profit is not high as the traditional trade, there are several merits in processing trade. You build few industrial buildings near the dock (so that the teamsters will carry the resource goods quickly). Here, you would no more produce raw materials and instead of that, you import them through the dock. 'Processing trade' is another type of trading. This type of trade is shown in the tutorial, so I would not explain that here. 'Traditional trade' is the orthodox economy in the game where you produce resource goods in mining or farming, process them in the industrial buildings, and export the product from the dock. There are several method of making money in trading.

In any Missions or Sandbox, these methods will help. This is a guide for earning money in Tropico 6.

Tropico 6 ancient ruins road