Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: multinational enterprise
- 2 History, the social sciences and economic ‘theory’, with special reference to multinational enterprise
- 3 The changing form of multinational enterprise expansion in the twentieth century
- 4 Electrical research, standardisation and the beginnings of the corporate economy
- 5 The nature of multinationals, 1870–1939
- 6 International price maintenance: control of commodity trade in the 1920s
- 7 Financial operations of US transnational corporations: development after the Second World War and recent tendencies
- 8 Multinational enterprise – financing, trade, diplomacy: the Swedish case
- 9 Foreign penetration of German enterprises after the First World War: the problem of Überfremdung
- 10 International industrial cartels, the state and politics: Great Britain between the wars
- 11 Vickers and Schneider: a comparison of new British and French multinational strategies 1916–26
- 12 J. & P. Coats Ltd in Poland
- 13 Multinationals and the French electrical industry, 1889–1940
- 14 The Japanese cotton spinners' direct investments into China before the Second World War
- 15 Mitsui Bussan during the 1920s
- 16 Japanese business in the United States before the Second World War: the case of Mitsui and Mitsubishi
- 17 The state and private enterprise in the United States–Latin American oil policy
- 18 Transnational corporations and the denationalization of the Latin American cigarette industry
- 19 Summary: Reflections on the papers and the debate on multinational enterprise: international finance, markets and governments in the twentieth century
- Index of names
- Index of firms
- Index of subjects
12 - J. & P. Coats Ltd in Poland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: multinational enterprise
- 2 History, the social sciences and economic ‘theory’, with special reference to multinational enterprise
- 3 The changing form of multinational enterprise expansion in the twentieth century
- 4 Electrical research, standardisation and the beginnings of the corporate economy
- 5 The nature of multinationals, 1870–1939
- 6 International price maintenance: control of commodity trade in the 1920s
- 7 Financial operations of US transnational corporations: development after the Second World War and recent tendencies
- 8 Multinational enterprise – financing, trade, diplomacy: the Swedish case
- 9 Foreign penetration of German enterprises after the First World War: the problem of Überfremdung
- 10 International industrial cartels, the state and politics: Great Britain between the wars
- 11 Vickers and Schneider: a comparison of new British and French multinational strategies 1916–26
- 12 J. & P. Coats Ltd in Poland
- 13 Multinationals and the French electrical industry, 1889–1940
- 14 The Japanese cotton spinners' direct investments into China before the Second World War
- 15 Mitsui Bussan during the 1920s
- 16 Japanese business in the United States before the Second World War: the case of Mitsui and Mitsubishi
- 17 The state and private enterprise in the United States–Latin American oil policy
- 18 Transnational corporations and the denationalization of the Latin American cigarette industry
- 19 Summary: Reflections on the papers and the debate on multinational enterprise: international finance, markets and governments in the twentieth century
- Index of names
- Index of firms
- Index of subjects
Summary
In 1918, J. & P. Coats Ltd of Paisley, the Scottish multinational thread manufacturers, were faced with the loss of one of the major components of their European empire: the Russian operation controlled through the Nevsky Thread Manufacturing Company of St Petersburg, which on the eve of the First World War had accounted for some 90% of Russian thread production, and which had from the 1890s yielded large profits to the parent company. Of the 150 million strong Russian market, only the populations of Poland and the Baltic states (c. 10 million) were still accessible; and of Coats' six main manufacturing units in Russia, only two tattered remnants had – so far – escaped the Bolsheviks: the Strasdenhof mill at Riga, and the Łódzka Fabryka Nici T.A. at Łódź, now in the shakily-reborn independent Polish state. Radical readjustments were therefore required. We should note that in 1918 all decisions on the future of the Łódź mill rested with Paisley alone: J. & P. Coats Ltd, while maintaining the polite fiction of being ‘only shareholders’ in subsidiary companies, was a highly-centralised operation. Correspondence with the Łódź company may indeed have been conducted throughout in courtly language of suggestion and advice, but this was merely a gloss on a management structure in which all decisions on investment, production patterns, employment policy, supplies and sales (the last through Coats' marketing arm, the Central Agency) were taken from headquarters departments at Paisley.
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- Historical Studies in International Corporate Business , pp. 135 - 142Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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