The newsboy trotted away, and there were a few people on the street who were reading the newspapers in their hands while hurrying to work, and those who could work on the Bund Avenue were either state employees or employees of large corporations, and these people, whether they worked there, belonged to the elite class of this era, and were roughly the same as the people who worked on Wall Street in later generations.

They are more concerned with some political and current affairs, and this is why they heard the newsboy shouting at the royal dinner in Shanghai yesterday, Lin Zhe gave a speech saying that the empire would continue to support industrial development before he would take out the money to buy a newspaper for a sneak peek.

The content of the newspaper about Lin Zhe's speech at yesterday's dinner was officially announced by the Palace Affairs Department, and the content of the speech not only highly praised the development of Shanghai in recent years, but also reaffirmed that the empire will continue to increase its support for industrial development in the future.

He reaffirmed that the empire would further support and remove many restrictions to promote the development of the textile industry.

For example, the speech focused on the wool industry!

He said that the empire will launch a series of support policies for the livestock industry this year, including tax exemptions and micro-loan support.

In order to further improve the development of the domestic textile industry, the empire will not only maintain a high degree of attention and investment in the existing raw silk industry and cotton spinning industry, but also guide capital into the wool industry.

With the Empire's complete control of the Northwest and the Mongolian steppes, it brought not only a large number of horses, but also a large amount of wool.

Although the quality of domestic wool is not as good as that of Australia, Britain and other places, it is impossible to leave it alone.

To know. In recent years, although the empire imported cotton. The quantity of cotton yarn has decreased greatly, but the amount of woolen wool imported has increased year by year.

This is mainly due to the fact that many domestic officials and upper-class people like to use woolen wool to make Chinese dresses.

At present, the main clothes in China are still mainly cotton. However, Chinese dresses and officers' clothing are all made of wool, and there was no large-scale production of woolen wool in China before, so they could only rely on imports.

In line with the principle of being able to import less, it has become natural to support the domestic development of the wool industry.

As long as it develops, the domestic woolen industry will not lack a market, and the general public may not have much to do with wool, but the consumption of woolen wool above the middle class is very large.

When Lin Zhe focused on the textile industry, especially the wool industry, in his speech, as the vanguard of Lin Zhe's implementation of industrial and commercial policies, the royal industry had already responded to Lin Zhe's call. Since last year, we have invested in the establishment of a woolen factory in Tianjin, and began to produce the first batch of machine-produced woolen woolen in China.

However, the business focus of the royal industry has shifted to heavy industry many years ago, and the investment in light industry is not too large.

And the royal industry has no plans to enter the wool industry on a large scale, so what are they doing?

They're building railways, they're building coal mines. Iron ore, steel mills, cement plants, and then various machinery manufacturing industries. In recent years, although there have been a lot of private capital involved in China, a number of super-large civil heavy industry enterprises with assets of more than 10 million yuan have also been developed. But after all, it is a minority, and it has relatively large limitations.

A lot of the time. The royal family invests in a certain industry purely to fill the gap in the country. And not to say that the issue of earnings prospects is taken into account.

Many of the industries in the royal family are aimed at making money, such as the Shanghai Textile Company.

Some are in order to stimulate local economic development, without considering profit prospects, at least not in the early stage, such as railway construction, steel plant construction, shipyards, etc.

Some are to meet the needs of national defense, such as the production of steam engines by Linde Machinery Company, which is purely a loss-making product, and Linde Machinery Company has been engaged in steam engines for so many years, although it is also profitable, but it still cannot offset the huge capital investment.

However, in general, most of the industries of the royal family are still profitable, but the speed of making money is slower, and the payback time is longer.

For example, the railway, even the Nanjing-Shanghai railway, which has the best profit prospects, wants to recover the construction cost of more than 10 million yuan, which cannot be done in three or five years.

Therefore, in many cases, it is not possible to look at the investment behavior of the royal family from a purely commercial point of view, because sometimes they are rich but not profitable, and sometimes they even make losses in trading.

In the wool industry, the royal industry belongs to the kind of money that does not make money, and they are not unaware that the wool industry has huge profit prospects, but it is impossible for them to free up a large amount of money to invest in the wool industry, because there are more projects waiting for them to invest.

As the so-called landlord's family has no margin, the royal industry with a big family also needs to be carefully calculated, so as to be able to respond to Lin Zhe's development requirements in a timely manner.

Lin Zhe's requirement for the royal industry is: to guide the development of domestic industry and commerce!

If you want to make money simply, it is actually very simple, relying on the royal family's background, the royal industry can even easily monopolize many domestic industries, but what is the point of this?

No matter how much money is earned, it doesn't make sense for the emperor of an imperial dynasty, gold and silver are just a bunch of metals, and silver is okay, it can also be used as an industrial raw material, but gold? It's really useless except for using it.

In a dynasty where the emperor is the country, for the emperor, or for the country, the stability of the country is the top priority.

And what conditions are needed to stabilize the country?

That is, the people's livelihood is stable and prosperous, so that people will not rebel because they have no food to eat, and at the same time, a comfortable life makes people fear the consequences of rebellion.

At the same time, we must also avoid the people being too disgusted with the imperial power, so you can't engage in massacres and play cleansing when you have nothing to do, and you can't let foreign countries bully you if they have nothing to do.

But this will cause a wave of anger among the people. If you don't blame the foreign powers, they will directly target you. Because in their eyes, it is the inaction of your ruler that will cause the loss of power and humiliation of the country.

So the battle was lost. And then the reparations to cede the land is extremely risky, and a position under the ass is not stable.

It's better to be able to win. From time to time, the people publicized the great martial arts of the following empires, how much land they invaded and how much indemnity they received, and so on. As for how many people died in the war, don't the Imperial military say that you ordinary people can know? Even if you know, it's not you who dies anyway, can you care?

Therefore, the core essence of developing the economy and people's livelihood, the development of industry or something, in fact, does not mean that the ruler is wholeheartedly for the sake of ordinary people, but the core essence is to stabilize his rule.

The so-called governing the country is really to protect power!

So. Don't think too much of the politicians, they reward you with a little favor, that is to prevent you from rebelling, and sometimes you give in, but also to prevent you from rebelling.

If one day you feel that the emperor or the president, the head of state, etc., is no longer the ruler of the country, and you want to speak out against it or simply oppose it, they will squeeze out the judiciary, the army, and all kinds of means to force you to submit. They do. It's like giving you bread, it's still about keeping power.

The politician gives you a piece of bread or gives you a bullet, the fundamental purpose is the same, only the method of execution is slightly different.

So much. It's just to say that the goal of Lin Zhe's royal industry is not to make money. And then let yourself live what a luxurious life, because as long as he wants. Then the entire empire is his private property, and it is not necessary to get a royal property to make money.

The purpose of the existence of the royal family's property. It is used to guide the development of domestic industry.

Specifically, we can look at the development trajectory of the Royal Bank in recent years.

Since the establishment of the Royal Bank, it has been the largest commercial bank in China, and it is also the core asset of the Royal Asset Management Office at present, even more important than the Shanghai Textile Industry, the three major arms companies and the Jiangnan Mining Company.

Although the Royal Bank's own assets are not large, and most of them are fixed assets, and its own liquidity is relatively small, the Royal Bank in the 1863 financial statements, the valuation of itself is 36 million yuan, and the assets calculated are mainly fixed assets and cash, as well as profits (not including the large amount of deposits it has).

Its net worth is not even as good as that of the Shanghai Textile Company, which is valued at 34 million yuan by the Royal Asset Management Office, of which nearly half of its assets are attributable to the raw silk business, just as the raw silk industry is still the leading industry in the domestic industry, and the raw silk business is also the core pillar business of the Shanghai Textile Company.

Its raw silk business accounts for nearly 50% of the company's revenue, and more importantly, this only 50% of the revenue contributes about 80% of the company's gross profit.

In addition, the cotton spinning business also accounts for about 25% of the company's revenue, and its cotton spinning business in addition to spinning and weaving, its garment business is also a major priority, because the Shanghai Textile Company is the main supplier of clothing for the Royal Army and the Royal Navy, and the military purchases a large number of military uniforms, quilts, shoes and hats, tents and other textiles from the Shanghai Textile Company every year.

As for the newly started woolen business, although the scale is too small, the proportion of revenue cannot even account for a few tenths of a percentage, not to mention it.

In addition to the above three traditional textile industries, Shanghai Textile Company also has a business that has nothing to do with textiles, that is, ocean trade.

Since 1858, the company began to get involved in ocean trade, in the early days mainly to organize its own cargo ships to transport raw silk to Europe for sale, and later gradually purchased some foreign goods to transport back to China, with an ocean shipping fleet, during the period there were 14 large and small ocean cargo ships, and set up a number of branches in Europe, the United States, Southeast Asia and other places.

After the outbreak of the American Civil War, the company's ocean-going trade began to get involved in the ordnance trade again, and the Shanghai Textile Company is currently the only ordnance import and export company in China.

As a result, the Shanghai Textile Company is the only company in the empire that has a license for the import and export of ordnance, and in recent years it has been sold to the United States and Southeast Asia.

For example, the Washington ironclad ship was ordered by the Americans at a price of 150,000 pounds, while in fact the construction cost of the Shanghai shipyard was only about 80,000 pounds, and the Shanghai shipyard gave an offer of 130,000 pounds. In other words, in the trade of this warship, the Shanghai shipyard made a large profit and took 50,000 pounds of profits, while the Shanghai Textile Company only acted as an intermediary and took 20,000 pounds from the sale, which shows how profitable the ordnance export business is.

At the same time, its ocean trading business is also engaged in some other import and export businesses.

As a result, the Shanghai Textile Company, which was originally only a single village textile company, had a huge import and export trade business department during the period, and the revenue of this ocean-going trade department accounted for 15% of the company's revenue.

Although the scale of its trading department is not as large as that of large British-funded foreign firms such as Jardine Matheson and Shun Tak, its business structure and operation mode are the same, and they have great prospects for arms import and export licenses.

You must know that at present, except for the Shanghai Textile Company, other enterprises, even foreign companies, cannot directly sell weapons to China, and if they want to sell them, they can only sell them to the Shanghai Textile Company.

Of course, there are no restrictions on official direct purchases!

However, when the empire was first unified, it had already explicitly ordered the extermination and prohibition of all illegal armed forces, and the local government did not have any military power.

In the empire, if someone buys weapons in large quantities, and this person is not a procurement officer of the military, then he wants to rebel 100%, and the military will immediately suppress and kill people.

As a result, there are now no other weapons customers in the entire empire except for the military and patrol police.

Those foreign companies that want to sell arms in China can only sell them to the government, but they can't buy them from anyone, as in the past.

Shanghai Textile Company, which has three major businesses: raw silk, cotton spinning, garment wool spinning, and trade, is the enterprise with the most assets and the largest profit in the royal industry.

But even so, it's not as important as the Royal Bank! (To be continued.) )

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