Posted on 09/10/2010 8:25:34 AM PDT by James C. Bennett
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A Dutch history student has unearthed the world's oldest share, dating back to 1606 and issued by the sea trading firm Dutch East India Company.
Locked away in forgotten city archives, the share was made out to Pieter Harmensz, a male resident of the Dutch city Enkhuizen who served as an assistant to the city's mayors.
After his death in 1638, Harmensz left the share to his widow and their daughter Ada and the document eventually ended up in Enkhuizen archives, kept in the northwestern city Hoorn.
As the Netherlands' largest trading company in the 17th and 18 centuries, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was also the world's first company to issue stock.
The 'Enkhuizen share' dates back to September 9, 1606, when Harmensz paid the last instalment of his 150 Dutch guilders.
Dutch research has shown the VOC faced early financial difficulties and shareholders were not initially paid dividends.
(Excerpt) Read more at af.reuters.com ...
Cool find!
So what’s it worth today?
Cool
/mark
Decline:
However, from there on the fortunes of the VOC (Dutch East India Company) started to decline. Five major problems, not all of equal weight, can be adduced to explain its decline in the next fifty years to 1780.
There was a steady erosion of intra-Asiatic trade by changes in the Asiatic political and economic environment that the VOC could do little about. These factors gradually squeezed the company out of Persia, Surat, the Malabar Coast, and Bengal. The company had to confine its operations to the belt it physically controlled, from Ceylon through the Indonesian archipelago. The volume of this intra-Asiatic trade, and its profitability, therefore had to shrink.
The way the company was organized in Asia (centralized on its hub in Batavia) that initially had offered advantages in gathering market information, began to cause disadvantages in the 18th century, because of the inefficiency of first shipping everything to this central point. This disadvantage was most keenly felt in the tea trade, where competitors like the EIC and the Ostend Company shipped directly from China to Europe.
The “venality” of the VOC’s personnel (in the sense of corruption and non-performance of duties), though a problem for all East-India Companies at the time, seems to have plagued the VOC on a larger scale than its competitors. To be sure, the company was not a “good employer”. Salaries were low, and “private-account trading” was officially not allowed. Not surprisingly, it proliferated in the 18th century to the detriment of the company’s performance.
From about the 1790s onward, the phrase perished by corruption (also abbreviated VOC in Dutch) came to summarize the company’s future.
A problem that the VOC shared with other companies was the high mortality and morbidity among its employees. This decimated the company’s ranks and enervated many of the survivors.
A self-inflicted wound was the VOC’s dividend policy. The dividends distributed by the company had exceeded the surplus it garnered in Europe in every decade but one (1710–1720) from 1690 to 1760. However, in the period up to 1730 the directors shipped resources to Asia to build up the trading capital there. Consolidated bookkeeping therefore probably would have shown that total profits exceeded dividends. In addition, between 1700 and 1740 the company retired 5.4 million guilders of long-term debt. The company therefore was still on a secure financial footing in these years. This changed after 1730. While profits plummeted the bewindhebbers only slightly decreased dividends from the earlier level.
Distributed dividends were therefore in excess of earnings in every decade but one (1760–1770). To accomplish this, the Asian capital stock had to be drawn down by 4 million guilders between 1730 and 1780, and the liquid capital available in Europe was reduced by 20 million guilders in the same period. The directors were therefore constrained to replenish the company’s liquidity by resorting to short-term financing from anticipatory loans, backed by expected revenues from home-bound fleets.
Despite of all this, the VOC in 1780 remained an enormous operation. Its capital in the Republic, consisting of ships and goods in inventory, totaled 28 million guilders; its capital in Asia, consisting of the liquid trading fund and goods en route to Europe, totaled 46 million guilders. Total capital, net of outstanding debt, stood at 62 million guilders. The prospects of the company at this time therefore need not have been hopeless, had one of the many plans to reform it been taken successfully in hand.
However, then the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War intervened. British attacks in Europe and Asia reduced the VOC fleet by half; removed valuable cargo from its control; and devastated its remaining power in Asia. The direct losses of the VOC can be calculated at 43 million guilders. Loans to keep the company operating reduced its net assets to zero
- De Vries and Van der Woude, pp.454-455
So now he probably owns Indonesia?
The taxes are due:
$10,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 guilders................
"The Fourth Anglo–Dutch War (1780–1784) was a conflict between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Dutch Republic. The war, tangentially related to the American Revolutionary War, broke out over British and Dutch disagreements on the legality and conduct of Dutch trade with Britain's enemies in that war."
Willard Waterman and Stephanie Griffin in the television version of The Great Gildersleeve, 1955
Holy cow! Fire the torpedoes, full steam ahead.
Cool map, but it only shows the Indian continent. The VOC worked mostly in present-day Indonesia, which is not shown there.
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Didn’t the Romans have rudimentary corporations with stock shares?
This may be the oldest DUTCH share, but, I doubt it’s the oldest share in a company put down in writing....
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