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4.8 BRITONS V. GERMANS IN CHINA Krupp and other manufacturers made a fine profit, but they seemed to take good care no one else did. The whole business was of a very shady character, secret com- missions were the order of the day, and for that reason many British firms refrained from attempting to compete.
The German engineers and importers of machinery are supposed to have had some mysterious advantage over the British. But here again the liquidations tell a strange story. Secret commissions were given to such an extent that very little profit accru- ed on the contracts they secured, and the results of this kind of trading were generally disastrous. This was not their experience in Hongkong only, as from correspondence unearthed by the writer, similar results were obtained by the machinery departments of certain German firms in the Northern part
of China. In Hongkong there is admitted-
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ly not sufficient scope for a large business in machinery, but there are several British importers all doing well, and in making a comparison one is quite apt to overlook the fact that the large British engineering and dockyard establishments import and manu- facture a great deal of machinery of all kinds. In Shanghai, where there is more demand, the British make a better showing than the Germans, and are firmly established in the trade. One German firm in Hongkong did a very large business in Marine Motors, but their books revealed the fact that practi- cally all the profit had been given away in commissions in order to cut into the business, So much for the trade in machinery: if the British have lost certain orders, there is little to regret, as the kind of business the Germans did was not profitable.
Having made several references to the fact that the Germans seemed
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