China has for years been an important consumer of American steel. Her takings cover many lines and include bridge material, pipe, sheets for roofing as well as for making stove-pipes; tin plate used in making containers of egg yolk, which she ships principally to the United States, wire goods of various kinds, nails, including an extremely small type used in making bamboo furniture. In addition, owing to her low labor costs, China is a great market for scrap steel, such as defective wire rods, wire shorts and seconds, bar ends and plate cuttings, which are worked by hand into all sorts of implements. The patient and industrious Celestial even finds use for old horseshoes, which he makes into razors. The Corporation has thirty-six foreign offices, located in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, British India, Canada, Chile, China, Cuba, France, Holland, Italy, Japan, Java, Mexico, Norway, Peru, Russia, Spain, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. In addition to these, it has one hundred and thirty-six distributors located in forty-four foreign countries. Although the Steel Products Co. avails itself of the facilities for shipping offered by the many steamship lines plying between America and foreign ports, the enormous expansion of its export trade has forced it to establish and maintain a large ocean-going fleet of its own. Formerly, the greater part of this fleet was chartered, but now the Corporation owns twenty vessels, and has only a few others chartered. These vessels carry its products all over the world, touching at many little-known ports and harbors, the waters of which are never disturbed by the prows of regular liners. At these places they put off loads of rails, tools, and diversified products, instruments with which pioneers, like railway builders, are extending the marts of civilization into untrodden lands. All of the owned vessels fly the Stars and Stripes, those built in foreign countries having been transferred to American registry immediately upon the passage of the Ship Registry Bill, in 1914. Most of the ships owned by the Corporation were built at its own plants in New Jersey and Alabama. The Federal Shipbuilding Co., the Corporation’s shipbuilding subsidiary near New York, has supplied it, so far, with nine vessels, each ranging from 3,450 to 3,821 tons net register. The Chickasaw Shipbuilding & Car Co. is responsible for the construction of four others, the largest of which, and the largest boat owned by the Corporation, is 4,045 tons net register on about 10,000 dead weight. The other seven vessels were purchased. At the time of writing the Corporation has under construction fourteen other vessels, all of which will be added to its fleet when finished. Two of the Corporation’s boats were lost during the war, one a victim to a German submarine and the other running aground off the Chilean coast early in 1918.