48th February.
Tue Chinese Engineering and Mining Ca., Ld,, is the largest foreign company actually working in China. It is a British company, though its capital is internationally owned; its success is therefore at the present time a matter of consequence to all of us, whether shareholders or not, and it is of interest to us all that the true condition of its affairs should be known, Any failure on the part of this pioneer company would reflect on all the foreign-promoted enterprises and industries which we hope to see working befure long in the interior to the mutual benefit of foreigners and Chinese.
In the first place it must be remembered that the former Chinese company which was taken over by the Chinese Engineering and Mining Ca., Ld, was unable to pay any dividend for 1900, and the mines were ina truly lamentable condition when they passed into the hands of the new company. During the troubles:'of 1900 they were successively exploited by Russian and German'troops; the shafts not having been properly looked after were full of water; the machinery was all out of order, and the inexperience of the staff be-euging to the Chinese conipany contributed to the general disorder. It wis only to be expected, then that the first few months of the. new ownership: should ive disappointing resus. Beyond that, a changd of regime a ways implies' a' period of stagnation, and this was accentuated in the case of the -Kaiping mines by the fact that the native employes at the mines were at'first as ill-disposed as possible. towards the company so that onthe -Ist of March last year not more than 200 tons of coal a day were.got out of the mines. This gradually increased, so that, ip, the first seven months the.average output was 24,400 tons+a ninth, at an average cost of $3.28 a ton.
Op'fhq Tet'6f October last the new European staff set vigorously to work, s0 that the monthly output rose October and November to 45,000 tons, the average cost falling simultaneously to $2.35 a ton.
The in- H by month; in December last it wa: 50,000 tons and last month, January, 54,000 tons. The engineers of the mine are convinced that these figures will be increased in March to 60,000 tons and in May to 90,000 tons, while for the remainder of the current year the output is expected to be 150,000 tons a month. Figures like these require no comment: they show the methodical and businesslike way in which the management of the mines is being conducted, and demonstrate that the care with which the board of directors has selected at home its technical agents has been amply justified.
Is has been objected, we understand, by critics of the new company that it is over-capitalised, which if it were true would be looked upon here as a fault on the right side, considering the number of enterprises that have got into difficulties here through under-capitalization. It is hinted, however, that the capital is so large that it cannot hope to earn satisfactory dividends, looking at the very much smaller' pecuniary resources with which the Chinese worked the property. The objection is easily answered. The task before the directors of the new company was to develop what was really a primitive concern and to furnish with he necessary modern plant and machinery a great enterprise which includes no less than four distinct collieries: Tangshan, West Shaft;
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.