When you read about modern businesses, it’s easy to forget that ‘business’, as a concept, is a made-up thing: a human game with some set of rules shaped by some set of economic realities intersecting with a certain social and technical environment.
The only thing you can expect to stay unchanged is human psychology. There’s this famous Jeff Bezos quip where he goes “‘What's not going to change in the next 10 years?’ (...) that second question is actually the more important [one] — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.” Human nature stays the same. Everything else is contingent.
As Commoncog starts on a series of cases on Asian conglomerates, I want to set this up as a reminder. It is going to be very tempting to talk about Asian businesses not as they are, but in comparison to some sort of ideal, ‘Platonic’ form of business that you will have in your head. (If you talk to me about Coase’s Theory of the Firm, I will, uh, show you the door.)
But it’s understandable that we will do this. We do this because there is an existing culture of talking about business as a series of abstractions. We have business schools now. And business books. We have folks who peddle in neat models of reality. You may have met operators who have been so completely compromised by such models; their heads are stuffed with frameworks they’ve gotten from blog posts and books that they are not able to think about their own situations from original observation. I do not want to fall into this trap.
One way to guard against this form of thinking is to draw from the full span of business history, which makes neat frameworks slightly harder to use. This is especially useful if we go back to the turn of the 20th century, when America itself looked more like Asia: under-developed, corrupt, with weak institutions and patchy rule of law. The folks who ran businesses then were no different from Asian tycoons (or from you or I): they were human and they had dreams; they had reputations and relations with each other and suffered from the same foibles and fears; they watched their competitors and thought of making a profit.
Sam Zemurray was a business operator who built an empire in the banana trade in the early 1900s. He stumbled onto his first banana — this exciting, new, exotic fruit — sometime in the late 1890s, and started as a solopreneur peddling ripes.
From the Commoncog case library:
It's unclear where Zmurri got his first banana, but one look, one taste, and he knew that bananas were going to be the next big thing.
In his early twenties, Zmurri travelled alone to Mobile, where the fruit boats arrived from Central America. He already had a plan in mind: he would purchase a supply of bananas of his own and sell them back in Selma.
At the ports, Zmurri made a shrewd observation: as the workers unloaded and sorted the bananas that arrived, there was a growing pile of bananas tossed carelessly to the side. When he asked the workers, they told him that those were the "ripes" — bananas that were too aged to be delivered in good condition to buyers, and thus useless.
Workers unloading bananas in Mobile (source).
But where others saw trash, he saw treasure.
Rich Cohen, in his 2013 biography The Fish that Ate the Whale, sums it up this way: “As far as he was concerned, ripes were considered trash only because Boston Fruit and similar firms were too slow-footed to cover ground. It was a calculation based on arrogance. I can be fast where others have been slow. I can hustle where others have been satisfied with the easy pickings of the trade.”
With just $150 in hand (around $5000 in 2024 money), Zmurri rented a small boxcar on the Illinois Central and bought all the ripes he could. The workers were glad to have them off their hands, and he ended up with a few thousand bananas. Without any organisational overhead (this was a one-man endeavour, after all), Zmurri was quick enough to sell these ripes in the next town, making a tidy sum of $40. Someone else might scoff at making such little profit, but Zmurri was pleased. He felt like he had stumbled into an overlooked, niche market.
His one-man business grew larger over time. At the break of dawn every day, he was waiting by the docks, ready to purchase his next supply of ripes. He sorted these ripes into different boxcars on the Illinois Central, with over-ripes going to nearby towns, ripes going to stores up to a hundred miles down the line, and about-to-ripes going as far as Memphis or Birmingham. In Mobile, he took a new identity — no longer was he Shmuel Zmurri, the poor Jewish immigrant from Russia; from now on he was Samuel Zemurray — "Sam the Banana Man" — the tall, lanky youth that only bought ripes and hustled like mad.
Route map of the Illinois Central (source). From Selma, Zemurray made his way to the ports of Mobile, and regularly took the Illinois Central to sell his ripes.
1903 marked a turning point. That year, United Fruit (UF) Company, the giant of the industry, reached out to Zemurray. Not to suppress him, but instead to support him. Together they cut a deal: all ripe bananas and about-to-ripes that UF shipped were now the property of Zemurray. It was a win-win situation: UF could get rid of bananas they deemed unsellable and for a bit of money besides; Zemurray received a guaranteed supply of ripes. That year, he sold 574,000 bananas. By the end of the decade, he would be selling more than a million.
Zemurray took on a business partner not too long after the UF deal, and together, they went on a purchasing spree. He was thinking big — no longer did he want to rely on ripes from other companies; he wanted a full supply to call his own. This meant reaching out to Central American farmers for a portion of their harvest, to import to America.
They started with $30k in capital (this is around $1.1 million in 2024 dollars). Owing to a limited budget, they could only acquire two failing businesses: Cuyamel Fruit Company, which consisted of a hundred acres on the Cuyamel River in Honduras, Latin America, and later, the Thatcher Brothers Steamship Company in 1905. Surprisingly, UF also chipped in on the latter purchase. They had taken a 25-percent stake in Zemurray and his business partner, and supported him silently from the sidelines through the years, keeping watch on their industry’s underdog.
Zemurray moved to Mobile and set up a small office there, complete with shipping schedules and railroad tables tacked on the walls. He quickly settled into a pattern: his days were based out of the office, negotiating prices and working deals with farmers and exporters. Cuyamel was an importer, not a grower, so Zemurray mostly worried about supply and price-setting during this phase.
He was, again, unsatisfied. Zemurray knew in his heart of hearts that if he wanted to take the company to the next level, they had to grow the bananas themselves.
To other businessmen, buying land in Honduras was — in the words of author Rich Cohen — like “buying swampland in Florida. It's the kind of deal where you sign the papers and they laugh when you walk out of the room.” But when Zemurray travelled there for the first time, he saw only endless possibilities in the thick, overgrown jungles.
Purchasing Cuyamel and Thatcher already left them dangerously low on funds, but he was undeterred. Zemurray had already tapped out every credit line in New Orleans and Mobile. He travelled to borrow from banks in New York and Boston. With all of this borrowed money, he bought all the land he could past the delta of the Cuyamel River. He then went one step further, travelling across Honduras to meet government officials in the pursuit of sweetheart deals. Zemurray’s calculations were simple: these concessions were necessary due to the nature of the industry — the trade was dependent on cheap fruit, necessitating cheap means of production. This meant that additional fees from import/export could drive their price right over the market rate set by UF. And maybe it was his charisma, his ambition, the conviction in his voice; we do not know. Zemurray succeeded. The Honduran officials granted an exemption to Cuyamel for export tax, and also exempted the company for import duties for all its equipment, allowing them to sell their products just as cheaply as UF.
Map of north-west Honduras (source). Zemurray first landed in Puerto Cortés, before opening his office in Omoa and buying land along the stretch of the Cuyamel River.
Eventually, in 1910, he settled in Honduras. He employed hundreds of workers: engineers, planters, machete men. And he carved out time to work alongside them, deep in the muck and the grime. His mentality was different from a regular businessman: he didn't want to sit in an office all day. He preferred to be in the thick of the action. Intelligent, proficient in Spanish, and physically fit, Zemurray was extremely competent; he earned the respect of his workers. Years later he attributed his success to knowledge of the inner workings of the banana trade: he had served every position there was, from farmer to trader; on the docks, on the ships, on the railroads. Cohen comments, “There was not a job he could not do, nor a task he could accomplish.”
This wealth of knowledge and close relations to his workers also enabled him to innovate in banana farming, inventing new farming methods in an industry that hadn’t changed since its early years. These methods included selective pruning, building new drainage systems and levees, and introducing overhead irrigation. Later, these methods would spread to UF and other companies.
Zemurray reaped his first harvest that year, and soon, he went out once again to purchase even more land, but he was already overextended, and had nowhere else to turn to. He was deep in debt. While others may have stopped here, Zemurray's hunger and drive was insatiable. While no one could say for sure what "unorthodox sources" he borrowed the money from, speculated that it was on "stringent terms, at rates approaching 50 percent." And it was definitely risky enough that his business partner refused to go any further, leaving Zemurray to buy out his partner’s share of the company.
He “must have realised the business had to get big to survive. Go all in, or get out. Sam was young and wanted to bet everything: great fortunes come from big plans.” Furthermore, Zemurray’s concessions were no guarantee for low costs. Even at the time, he knew that the only real way to guarantee low costs for his bananas was to become a scale player. Anything less and the business was likely to lose against eventual competition.
By 1914, Zemurray had accumulated enough profits to buy back the share UF owned in Cuyamel, securing his independence. And by 1924, he had paid off all his creditors. Although UF still held market dominance, Cuyamel was now their largest competitor, and even arguably better than them. Cohen writes it like this:
Cuyamel was superior to United Fruit in a dozen ways that did not show up on a balance sheet. U.F. was a conglomerate, a collection of firms bought up and slapped together. There was a lot of redundancy, duplication of tasks, divisions working against divisions, confusing chains of command. Cuyamel Fruit was the Green Bay Packers by comparison. Every decision was made with confidence and authority. Zemurray could move without waiting for permission or a committee report. He could take risks without fear of losing his job. He could hire or fire with surety because he actually lived in Honduras and knew the situation on the ground. It was a contrast of styles: the executives who ran United Fruit had taken over from the founders and were less interested in risking than in preserving. Zemurray was the founder, forever on the attack, at work, in progress, growing by trial and error, ready to gamble it all. The difference was best seen on the plantations, where Zemurray was constantly inventing.
Cuyamel seemed on a fast trajectory to success, and soon, UF realised that it was a genuine threat to their monopoly. In 1925, they reached out again to Cuyamel, in hopes of buying out the company. Zemurray turned them down immediately. His response was this: "Hell, I'm having so much fun, and I’m a young man. Why should I quit?"
I have a few notes.
The biggest thing that leapt out to me was the way Zemurray perceived the nature of competition in his business. It was all born of common sense. He saw that UF set the price of bananas, and so in order to match the price he had to reach for scale. This consideration dominated nearly everything else: it dominated his view of competition, it underscored his naked ambition, and it caused him to gamble everything — taking on more and more debt, until he was forced to go it alone.
Today, we would sit around in comfortable lecture halls and talk about ‘economies of scale’. We would study Henry Ford, probably — who was, at the time, a failed entrepreneur. We might talk about Hamilton Helmer’s surplus leader margin equation. But Zemurray had no such airs. He had no name for his desire to get big, only a response to the economic realities in front of him. Everything in his corner of the business universe was built around the cost of banana production. He needed to get his costs down, and keep it lower than any other new entrant, and to do that he needed to get big, and the reason he needed to get big was because United Fruit was already big, and could’ve crushed him. It was nice that they invested in him; better to keep your enemies close.
When Zemurray entered Honduras in 1906, Henry Ford was three years into his second company (his first was taken away from him by his investors), and four years away from launching the Model T. Harvard Business School was created two years after Zemurray bought Cuyamel. There was no such concept as ‘scale economies’. There were no abstractions to talk about here — there was just the game in front of him.
I think it’s useful to hold onto this image. Yes, we have more knowledge now; one definition of wisdom is learning from books what can be learnt from books, instead of learning from painful experience. But there are many times in business where we will find ourselves doing something unique — where we may see ourselves in the shoes of Sam the Banana Man, 30 years of age, in more debt than he had any right to be, clearing jungle in Honduras because he had to get the costs down, and hoping that whatever he was doing would let him win.
My assertion is that business in Asia in the previous generation was closer to Zemurray’s reality 100 years ago. We should see what that means soon enough.
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Originally published , last updated .
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