CORPORATIONS Vitamins for Revlon

U.S. drug companies have been taking eagerly to cosmetics. Bristol-Myers was one of the first to beautify itself by buying Clairol. Among recent mergers: Chas. Pfizer and Coty, American Cyanamid and Breck. Last week, in a reverse play that took both the drug and the cosmetics industries by surprise, Revlon, Inc., whose sales of more than $195 million in 1964 made it the second biggest U.S. cosmetics maker (after Avon Products), announced that it is buying a well-known U.S. drug company.

Revlon wants to acquire 30-year-old U.S. Vitamin & Pharmaceutical (vitamins, diabetic products, vascular drugs) for some of the same reasons that have drawn drug companies to cosmetics. Research in the two fields tends to overlap, often producing a cosmetic that a drug firm finds hard to market or a drug that a cosmetics manufacturer is at a loss to understand. Revlon hopes that combined research will turn up products that can be readily retailed in drugstores, which are thoroughly covered by Revlon's crack 168-man sales force.

Revlon's aggressive chairman, Charles Revson, 58, is in a diversifying mood. In the past three years, he has bought six companies in everything from ladies' sportswear (Evan-Picone) to plastic packaging (Amerline), thereby added more than $25 million a year to RevIon's sales. The $67.5 million that RevIon will pay for U.S. Vitamin (1964 sales: $21 million) may seem high, but Charlie Revson considers the price cheap enough in an age obsessed by health and about to be presented with medicare. In the trade, there is already speculation about whether he plans to rewrite U.S. Vitamin's product list (Arlidin, Methischol, Aquasol) to bring it more in line with Revlon's -which bears such names as Million-Dollar Red, Fabulash and Pussy Cat Pink.

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