The eleven-story building of the Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd., in downtown Melbourne, is stark and cheerless, almost down at the heels, by U.S. corporate standards. And its tenant is fusty and taciturn. But . B.H.P., as the 77-year-old steelmaker is known Down Under, has paced— and made possible—the galloping growth of Australian industry since World War II. In the process, it has become a sort of Australian version of A.T. & T., refuting the old dictum that basic industry in a democracy cannot be entrusted to a monopoly.
B.H.P. today produces virtually 100% of Australia's steel and is the country's biggest publicly held company. Although B.H.P.'s total annual capacity of 4,000,0000 tons is less than Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point plant, it is the British Commonwealth's biggest steelmaker, with sales of some $413 million in the last fiscal year. Through 16 subsidiaries it makes everything from nails and rails to tools and tars, operates a fleet of 14 cargo ships and a shipyard, and is probing for oil off the Australian coast.
The Corporate Ascetic. Despite its prosperity, B.H.P. has chosen for itself the role of corporate ascetic. Says one former executive, ruefully recalling his $18-a-week expense allowance: "The place is run like a pawnshop." The sprawling B.H.P. shop is presently managed by a triumvirate that prefers fishing to nightclubbing and warily shies away from public notice. The ruling trio: courtly Chairman Colin Y. Syme, 59. a Melbourne lawyer; Managing Director Norman E. Jones, 58, a quiet chemist and metallurgist; and impatient Ian M. McLennan, 52, chief general manager, who joined B.H.P. in 1933 in a cadet engineer's "pick-and-shovel" job. Travelling tirelessly, Syme, Jones and McLennan leave so little authority to underlings that until recently B.H.P. plant managers were forbidden to make expenditures of more than $225 without permission. The limit has now been raised to $2,225.
Named for a rock outcrop in the New South Wales back country where it began mining a treasure-trove of silver, lead and zinc in 1885, B.H.P. turned to steelmaking in the early 1900s. Led by the late Essington Lewis, a single-minded empire builder who made himself Australia's "Mr. Steel," the company doggedly pursued efficiency, threw up new plants, cornered rich ore and coal reserves, and by 1935 had gobbled up its only major competitor. But it was the pell-mell postwar growth of heavy industry and construction in Australia that gave B.H.P. its biggest forward push. With all Australia virtually its private preserve, the company more than doubled its output in a decade. Equity capital flowed in for the asking as eager Australian investors flocked to oversubscribe new stock issues.