INDUSTRY OF GERMANY.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4841, 15 June 1925, Page 3

INDUSTRY OF GERMANY.

MODERN SHIPBUILDING YARDS.

AN ECONOMIC COMBINE. ‘‘The main causes of Engiish shipyards losing 50,000 tons of new construction to Hamburg are now known (writes Mr J. L. Garvin in the “Observer”), The difference between the best British estimates and the foreign competitive figure was too wide to be birjdged. To build at home would have meant to the shareholders a total loss of over £300,000 on the five ships. At that price patriotic economics were impossible. But where was it placed ? Here we pass from the history of a contract to the record of a foreign establishment. Some of the world’s foremost experts have for years been convinced that the example set by Lord Fisher in the British Navy must be copied largely by all merchant marines, and that the oil-driven vessel —owing to. its signal economy' in working and despite the larger initial cost—will be the dominating type of the future. That at least it must be one of the main types has long been certain and undisputed. A German concern, the Deutsche Werft, of Hamburg, concentrated on this certanity. This establishment is only five years old. It occupies a unique position in Germany, and has become the greatest and most modern shipbuilding yard on the whole European Continent. In its relatively short, existence it has specialised on motor vessels. As regards this new shiptype it has acquired nothing less than an international supremacy.

"The foresight of the Deutsche Werft —whose name, of course, means emphatically "The German Yard”— was justified. While most other establishments were as slack as our own .this one began to flourish pn foreign orders. Those orders at first came chiefly from Holland; The Dutch remain as of old, a highly intelligent nation in maritime affairs. Then from Sweden came the' celebrated commission to build the two biggest motorships in the world’s carrying trade--20,600 tons each. Finally, the more astonishing thing followed. So soon after the war England, in its worst time of unemployment and commercial depression, went to Germany to build the ships of the future. What is the secret of this greatest, though youngest, of big Continental shipyards ? Part of the secret lies in its own specialised technique, no doubt, but more in its far-reaching arrangements with feeding industries, —in the breadth and strength of the syndic#t»d basis on which it was founded. It is connected thoroughly with every kind of ■supporting trade and enterprise. The Hamburg-Amerika line gives its work to this shipyard. The General Electric Company of Berlin supplies tne Diesel engines at the lowest practical rates. Above all, perhaps, there stands behind the Deutsche Werft, and in closest association, one of tne biggest German iron and steel syndicates, the Good Hope Works, of Oberhausen. This powerful combine not ■only delivers the bulk of the steel used in the shipyard, but, beforehand, works up that material as far as possible into finished parts. This is done at Oberhausen, where wages are lower’than at Hamburg.

"By this method original production of the parts is cheapened, their carriage to the scene of building is cheapened, their assembly on arrival is cheapened. At every link of the chain there is economy of money and time —on the prime materials, the transport, the engines, on all the overhead charges; on the whole process of construction, installation, and completion from the crude masses of coal and ore inland to the launching of the ocean-going motor ship, the last word in marine architecture. In its five years’ experience the management of the Deutsche Werft has never ceased its vigilant and minute efforts to improve on its performance with every ship it builds, and to perfect its precesses by linking up scientific research with practical experience. The success of the Deutsche Werft is a triumph of specialisation and combination ; of unresting intellectual enlinked forces. To borrow a military ergy in the management of intermetaphor, we may say that German industry is not only well arrayed in line, but admirably organised in depth.”'