Reorganization and Financial Reconstruction
At the sixtieth Annual General Meeting on 29 April 1927 at the River Don Works, Sheffield, the chairman, General Herbert Lawrence, reported that the ordinary dividend would be passed because of the Coal Strike. His review gave the activities of the main groups of operations divided under five main heads:
- Armaments and shipbuilding
- Heavy engineering
- these two activities are carried on mainly at works in Sheffield, Barrow, Erith, Dartford and Weybridge
- Rolling-stock —Metropolitan Carriage Wagon and Finance Company
- Electrical —Metropolitan-Vickers
- Miscellaneous —They had disposed of Docker Brothers Limited. He had reported last year that an internal reorganization was in progress to deal with those subsidiary branches which proved a heavy drain on financial resources.
This internal review led to the retention of the rolling stock group: Metropolitan Carriage Wagon and Finance Company and The Metropolitan -Vickers Company and the disposal of:
- Vickers-Petters Limited
- British Lighting and Ignition Company (manufacture of BLIC magnetos) —shut down
- the Plywood department at Crayford Creek
- Canadian Vickers
- William Beardmore and Company
- Wolseley Motors (losses since the Armistice were in excess of £1.25 million and unable to pay creditors the company was being compulsorily wound up by the court).
Subsequently Vickers carried through a financial reconstruction scheme which after making additional reserves for contingent liabilities reduced their assets by £12.5 million and their total balance sheet from £34.7 to £22.2 million.
Read more about this topic: Vickers Limited
Famous quotes containing the word financial:
“A theory of the middle class: that it is not to be determined by its financial situation but rather by its relation to government. That is, one could shade down from an actual ruling or governing class to a class hopelessly out of relation to government, thinking of gov’t as beyond its control, of itself as wholly controlled by gov’t. Somewhere in between and in gradations is the group that has the sense that gov’t exists for it, and shapes its consciousness accordingly.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)