The Company ownership
Originally, the Company was headquartered in London, and many early investors were British, but by 1914, it was re-organized with its Board of Directors meeting in Hong Kong. Complete lists of shareholders survive for most of the 1920s, by which time the overwhelming majority of shares were held by people based in Hong Kong; about a third of these people were ethnically Chinese, and they owned about 40% of all shares. (Some shares were also owned by institutions, but individuals predominated.) About 10% of shares in this privately held firm changed hands in a typical year, through a combination of purchases, gifts, and inheritance.
In 1921, for instance, the company’s 280,000 shares were held by 568 individuals and institutions, for an average of roughly 500 shares each. This represented a substantial amount of wealth; it was equal to about 3 years’ worth of earnings for an unskilled manual worker. So most of the owners were wealthy, and the occupations that they listed for themselves were mostly ones like “banker,” “lawyer,” “engineer,” or “merchant.” There were also some retirees and widows, who probably came from similar families. But there were some small shareholders with 10-50 shares, and these included a few with very different occupations, including “maid servant” “amah,” “blacksmith,” and “stevedore.”
The biggest institutional investors in the company were the French Catholic mission in Hong Kong, the Dominican mission, and the company that ran the Peak Tram. Some of the famous individual investors included:
- Sir Robert Hotung, said to be the richest man in Hong Kong, and a major financial backer of the revolutionary leader (and first president of the Chinese Republic) Sun Yatsen/Sun Zhongshan. Hotung was also a director of Tung Wah Hospital, of Hong Kong Land, and various other charities and businesses.
- Joseph Whittlesey Noble became the majority owner of the South China Morning Post in the early 1900s, rescuing the company from bankruptcy and re-orienting it towards Chinese (rather than British Empire) news. Noble was originally a dentist from the United States; for a brief period he was the dentist to the Qing Imperial family in Beijing, and was richly rewarded. He then moved to Hong Kong, and though he did open a dental clinic there, he soon shifted his focus to business and investing. In addition to SCMP, he was also a major investor in Dairy Farm, Hong Kong Electric, China Light and Power, and other important Hong Kong firms. In 1921, he was the biggest individual investor in the Tramways, holding about 5% of the shares.
- Sir Paul Chater was an Armenian businessman from Calcutta who came to Hong Kong in 1864 and became one of the city’s leading entrepreneurs. He was one of the two founders of Dairy Farm and was also a founder of the Hong Kong Electric Company. He played a major role in the Praya Land Reclamation Project, which eventually created about 60 acres of new land along the waterfront in Central. Another of his property ventures was founding the real estate company Kowloon Wharf and Godown, which later became Wharf Holdings, Ltd. Almost 90 years after its founding, Wharf became the owners of Hong Kong Tramways, operating the company for 35 years (1974-2009). Chater also served for 34 years as Chairman of the Board of the Hong Kong Jockey Club.
Thirty-five years after he came to Hong Kong from Calcutta, Chater sponsored five young Armenians who also came from Calcutta to Hong Kong – on the same boat he had travelled on back in 1864. All of them started out as postal inspectors – jobs Chater seems to have arranged for them -- but then left the post office to go into business. At least two of them later became substantial investors in the Hong Kong Tramways themselves: Mackertich Cyril Owen and Tigram Matthews Gregory, who became one of Hong Kong’s biggest diamond merchants.
Other prominent Hong Kong residents who had substantial holdings in the tramways included Chau Siu Ki, Chairman of the Board of the Tung Wah Hospital charities, and Hon Tsz Ng comprador for the National Bank of China, also a board member for Tung Wah Hospital, and a member of LegCo.
