Wonderful

In the outpouring of first-quarter earnings, many a company reported the best sales and profits in its history. Of 236 companies which had reported by last week, 167--or 71%--showed profit rises. The food industry, helped by lower commodity prices, furnished some of the rosiest reading. Clinton Foods (Snow Crop frozen foods) had a 651% gain (to $1,200,000), Continental Baking almost 132% (to $1,400,000). A. E. Staley had a 125% gain, to $1,200,000, and Corn Products Refining was up 60% ($3,800,000).

Soapmakers also profited from the state of the commodity market. Colgate's net was up 46%. The chemical industry was also up. Du Pont showed a 14% increase in sales ($440 million) and a 12% increase in profits ($53.9 million) over 1952's first quarter. While the second biggest company, Union Carbide & Carbon, was not far behind (sales up 12% and profits up 10%), some of the biggest gains were rung up by the smaller companies. Thus Mathieson Chemical's $4,700,000 net was a 79% increase, Rohm & Haas's $1,700,000 a 28% increase.

The same pattern held true in many other industries. In aluminum, Alcoa's $13,300,000 profit was a 13% gain, but fast-expanding Reynolds Metals' $7,000,000 was a 111% gain. Neither the biggest steel nor the biggest auto companies have yet reported, but in both industries smaller companies showed big gains. Specialty-steelmaker Allegheny Ludlum had a 44% increase (to $2,000,000), and Sharon Steel's $2,000,000 was a 49% gain. (But middle-sized Armco showed a 3% drop.) In autos, Packard was way ahead of last year (see below), and Nash-Kelvinator, which had been hit by a strike last year, had an astounding gain of 1,018% (to $6,200,000).

There were plenty of individual exceptions to the general rise. Price-cutting in the "wonder drugs" and heavy criticism of Chloromycetin drove Parke Davis' net down 57% (to $2,200,000), and further inroads on coal's markets by oil and gas drove Pittsburgh Consolidation's net down 12% (to $3,000,000).

All the companies with gains had sold harder to get it. Westinghouse, for example, had to boost its sales 18% in order to get half that big a rise in its net profit ($16.9 million). But its bigger rival, giant General Electric, boosted sales 39%, to $777.8 million. G.E.'s President Ralph Cordiner was so optimistic that he figured his profits on the assumption that the excess-profits tax will die in June, thus showed a thumping 58% rise in profits ($45.8 million), from $1.01 a share to $1.59. If the tax doesn't die, G.E.'s profit will be cut to $1.17, a gain of only 17%. Cordiner also gave the week's best answer to those who fear that peace would cause a recession. Announcing that G.E. will spend $500 million on expansion in the next three years, bringing its postwar total to $1.1 billion, Cordiner said: "Any promises of peace in Korea and throughout the world should be wholeheartedly welcomed. Industry has a growing job to do even if we are fortunate enough to arrive at the point where our defense job can be cut back . . . We believe the electrical manufacturing industry will grow more than twice as fast [in the next decade] as the remainder of the economy."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.