Tata

"A waiting game now opened. It demanded a sense of timing as well as tactical subtlety. The rival Sassoon firms would continue to watch each other, both vigilant for any sign that Tata would either crash or survive. Judging from the first two or three years at the Empress Mills, Sir Albert was being proved right. The stocky Parsee had made the beginner's error of buying inferior looms. His cloth was poor in quality, with production figures even lower than those of his Bombay competitors. His Company stock slumped to half its issue value, and several shareholders started to panic. He hurried back to Lancashire and sank most of his remaining cash in better and more up-to-date plant, scrapping the old machinery. Within a very short time, his bales became saleable and output shot up. He could soon pay stockholders a 16 per cent dividend, but continued to plough every spare rupee back into the business. E. D. Sassoon & Co. had now learned enough. They quickly bought land for factory sites and began looking around for any badly-run mills which might be taken over at cost or even below and put on a paying basis. Their branches had long handled Lancashire piece-goods and would find it comparatively simple to distribute cloth manufactured in Bombay. Tata lacked capital and was buried in the interior, while they had superior shipping facilities as well as warehouses ideally sited on Bombay's splendid harbour and docks. Moreover, immigrant Jews from Baghdad would make a reliable home-based labour force, far less prone to absenteeism than the migrants of Nagpur."

"Production remained a key problem in all the Sassoon mills. The manufacturing boom had stimulated such a demand that it was not always practical to wait for new factories to be built and equipped. Semi-derelict businesses - one of them had been wound up four times in the past twenty years - were therefore bought up cheaply. Ancient plant operated by steam engines and wheezy boilers was scrapped, and the latest machinery imported from England at whatever the cost. Efficient planning by Manchester experts was backed by dedicated Jewish overseers who gradually overcame the endless frictions and chaos of the old Managing Agency system. Working on similar and parallel lines, the two Sassoon firms soon went ahead of all their rivals, including Tata himself, who might have given them much severer competition had he not turned his attention to the richer fields of iron and steel. Even so, his early supporters had no cause to complain. The original £50 Empress Mill shares would be worth £700 by 1914!"