$15,886,000 ISSUE FOR DUNLOP RUBBER

The New York Times
December 9, 1922

English Auto Tire Corporation Sells Its Bonds to New York Banking Syndicate.

TO BE OFFERED TO PUBLIC

Proceeds, It Is Stated, Will Be Spent Here—Sir Eric Geddes Heads American Company.

The Dunlop Rubber Company, Ltd., largest manufacturer of automobile tires in England, which invaded the American field two years ago with a factory at Buffalo, has sold an issue of $15,886,000 first mortgage 7 per cent. bonds to a syndicate of New York bankers.  A public offering of the bonds, which will be dollar securities, will be made on Monday morning.  It is expected the price will be about a 7.5 per cent. basis.  The bonds in 1942.

The issue will be the largest piece of foreign industrial financing in the New York market this year.  The proceeds of the bond sale, it is stated, will be expended in the United States for expansion of factories and sales agencies here.

The contract provides that the parent corporation will deposit with its American corporation sufficient of its pound sterling first mortgage 7 per cent. bonds to amount to $16,000,000 and the bonds sold to American investors will be issued against them, thus becoming a first mortgage on the American plants of the corporation and also on properties of the parent corporation abroad.

The American corporation, incidentally, has been reorganized although it retains the name of the Dunlop Tire & Rubber Corporation of America.  Sir Eric Geddes, brother of the British Ambassador at Washington, has been made Chairman of the Board, and Frederic W. Allen, of Lee, Higginson & Co., will represent banking interests on the Board.  Other members are Pierre du Pont, J. J. Storrow, Sir J. George Beharrell, Robert K. Pomeroy, banker of Buffalo, Louis Bergen and Charles A. Proctor, Directors of the English Company; Frederic C. Walcott and J. Westren, general manager.

It is planned to resume operations at the corporation's Buffalo factory at once, giving employment to between 8,000 and 10,000 men.  The plant will have a capacity of 13,000 tires per day.

Sir Eric Geddes, the new Chairman of the Dunlop Tire & Rubber Corporation of America, received his early business training in this country.  It was as plain Eric Geddes that he engaged in lumbering and afterward in railroad management in West Virginia, from where he went to India in forestry and railroad work.  In 1904 he was called to England to become general manager of the North Eastern Railways, which place he held until the war's outbreak.

After spending a few weeks in the United States, chiefly with his brother, the British Ambassador in Washington, Sir Eric will sail today for England on the White Star liner Homeric.  He will return to America in January.