Elias Sassoon: Lone Hand Opportunist in Foreign Markets

"As expected, the quiet and secretive Elias was careful with his money and inclined to play a lone hand. Within a few years, he was able to pay over £2,000 for shares in the China Steam Navigation Company. He also snapped up sites on the Shanghai mud flats at agricultural prices, sometimes as low as £90 an acre. (It would soar to £300,000 an acre by the time his grandson, Sir Victor, came to develop the Bund!) He guessed that the port must grow, but was surprised by the influx of fifty thousand Chinese labourers who poured into the Settlement by 185 5, eager to work and escape vicious taxation by the warlords. Elias would be among the first to invest in the housing estates that soon sprawled over the Chinese city."

"The first Sassoon had arrived in China in 1844. He was David's second son, Elias, who decided that Shanghai and Hong Kong offered by far the best prospects for opium and textiles. He had previously put up his sign in Canton and followed the example of Jardine, Matheson & Co. by financing shipments and giving small-scale merchant banking facilities to others, while sending his own goods up the coast."

"After only ten years of independent trading, Elias and his sons felt equipped, both psychologically and financially, to give a lead to the more complacent parent firm. Cotton manufacture was an obvious outlet, but Sassoon caution made Elias hesitate until a Parsee had again shown the way. J. N. Tata recovered from his misadventures with Premchand Roychand and indirectly profited by his experiences in the false boom. During the ill-starred attempt to open an Indian Bank in England, he hurried to Lancashire to develop the brokerage side of their business. He interested himself in machinery and the workings of the Manchester Cotton Exchange. On his return, he thought much about the possibilities of manufacturing cotton locally instead of relying on Lancashire's piecegoods. Fourteen mills were now operating in Bombay with about half a million spindles, but many more had closed down through lack of money or bad management. To rebuild his capital Tata had first gone to Hong Kong, exchanging silk goods for the opium his brother shipped out from Bombay. Profits were satisfactory, but he saw little chance of breaking either the Sassoons' hold on this two-way traffic or the handsome rebates and discounts which they and others enjoyed in the freight market. He returned to India in 1869, investing his limited funds in a disused oil-pressing plant which he rapidly converted into a small cotton mill. The output was insignificant and not of good quality, but he familiarized himself with machinery and day-to-day administration. He recovered his whole outlay in two years and sold the plant at a respectable profit."