The total volume of business amounted to $796,894,299, of which $518,999,605 represented sales to outside customers; $211,910,441 inter-company sales, and the balance transportation and other business. The average number of employees was 228,906, the highest recorded so far, and production totalled 16,656,361 tons of ingots and 12,374,838 tons of finished steel products. The principal expenditures for capital account included $2,960,124.92 spent at Gary, $5,912,027.44 at Duluth, and $1,274,440.84 on the Tennessee plants. Fee title was also acquired during the year to certain ore properties previously worked on a royalty basis. This cost $11,670,181.87, of which $2,283,677.63 was paid in cash, and the remainder in notes of the Oliver Iron Mining Co.
We now come to 1914, the year which saw the beginning of the Great War, with its disastrous results on business generally, and on no line of activity more than the steel trade. The events of this year are too recent and too well known, too vitally important to all, to need repetition. Industry, in the middle of the year, was just beginning to struggle out from the depression that had begun in the latter half of 1913 when the sudden clash of arms paralyzed world money markets, closed the stock and other exchanges, closed or restricted operations at hundreds of plants of one kind or another, and threw thousands of workers out of employment.
The demand for steel, never very active at any time since about July, 1913, fell almost to a vanishing point, and earnings of the Corporation in the last quarter declined to the lowest point in its history, $10,935,635.36. Total earnings for the year were only $71,663,615.17, and, although the dividend rate on the common stock was reduced from 5 per cent. to 2 per cent. annually in the third quarter, and the dividend for the last quarter was passed, earnings were not sufficient to meet charges, and a deficit of $16,971,983.83 was reported.
The necessity for passing the dividend--and it was a pressing one--was keenly deplored both by the management of the big company and, naturally, by its stockholders. That payments would have been maintained had there seemed the slightest warrant for such a course seems to be beyond question as the directors realized that the wide distribution of the stock, and the fact that many of its shareholders were people of small incomes who looked to their Steel dividends almost with the feeling of security they would have reposed in good bonds, would make their action necessarily a great hardship to many. But there was no way out. Even had wages been reduced there did not, at the time, appear to be any hope that profits for a long time would meet requirements, and the conservation of resources was paramount. But wages were not cut. In the early part of 1915, with earnings running even lower than in the last quarter of 1912, the matter was considered, but a slight increase in business was seized upon as a warrant for the continuance of the old wage scale. The steel worker was saved, although the steel stockholder suffered.