A Long Way from Utah

In 68 years of far-ranging enterprise, Utah Construction & Mining Co. has spent hardly any money on advertising or public relations. For good reason. "We don't sell to the ultimate consumer," explains President Edmund W. Littlefield, 54. "We have relatively few customers, and relations with them are handled directly at the executive level."

The ultimate consumer might be surprised to learn that the company is based not in Utah but on San Francis co's California Street. He might also be surprised to know that Utah Construction & Mining helped build the Hoover and Bonneville dams and the Alcan Highway, and last year completed $1.4 billion worth of work on the ambitious new San Francisco Bay Area rapid-transit system. Utah's revenues of $1 13.3 million and earnings of $16,543,000 last year resulted from such diverse and far-flung sources as real estate sales on California's Monterey Peninsula, mining operations in Peru, Australia and Canada, and a fleet of nine super-size ore and oil carriers, to which three new 128,000-ton ships will soon be added.

Away from Railroads. Last week an international syndicate of investment houses, including Lehman Brothers and Paris' Pays-Bas bank, underwrote a $30 million issue of Utah convertible Eurobonds offered to non-American buyers. The company will borrow another $50 million or so from banks in the U.S. and abroad. All the money will be used in the development of a promising new coal field in Australia, which represents Utah's largest single undertaking up to now.

One reason for Utah's success is stable management. Seven of the company's twelve directors are descendants of the industrious builders and bankers who founded the company in Ogden, Utah. Among the seven are Littlefield and onetime Federal Reserve Chairman Marriner S. Eccles, who has been Utah's chairman since 1940 but, after turning 78 last week, now calls himself "a part-time operator."

The company originated as a track builder for Western railroads. It undertook dozens of rail projects, notably a 725-mile stretch (with 45 tunnels) of Western Pacific line through the Sierra Nevada and the Feather River Canyon. In the 1930s, Utah started its all-out expansion. It became one of Six Companies, Inc., a consortium that also included Henry Kaiser and Morrison-Knudsen Co., which bid jointly on Hoover, Bonneville and many another mammoth engineering project in the booming West. The Six Companies have long since separated, but Utah is still heavily involved in construction. It currently has a $102 million backlog of orders ranging from landfill work in San Francisco Bay to tunnel and powerhouse projects at New Zealand's Manapouri Dam.

Conglomerate Miner. In 1959, the firm added "Mining" to its name in order to reflect newer operations that now account for 65% of its revenues. "Mining is our upward thrust," says Littlefield. The thrust started when Utah decided to adapt its earth-moving skills to open-pit mining projects. It has since become, in effect, a conglomerate miner.

Utah is one of the nation's biggest uranium-oxide suppliers to the Atomic Energy Commission, operates Lucky Me mine in Wyoming. The company has a contract with the Navajo tribal council giving it an option to strip-mine rich coal deposits on the Navajo reservation in northwestern New Mexico. More recently, Utah obtained options on valuable copper deposits on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Up Down Under. Littlefield and his colleagues never undertake a project unless Utah is certain of a customer as well as a supply. Much of the Navajo coal, for instance, will be sold to large Western utilities. They will operate two steam plants near the mine to generate 1,510,000 kilowatts of electricity for six states. The company's newest thrust upward, however, is Down Under, where Utah and two partners will soon be shipping 4,500,000 tons of iron ore a year from the Mount Goldsworthy mine in western Australia. Utah is also developing six deposits of coking coal in Queensland that are among the world's biggest. Not surprisingly, all the ore and coal are so far committed to raw material-poor Japanese steel and chemical companies. One of Utah's favorite customers back home is U. S. Steel, for which the company supplies some 600,000 tons of ore annually from a mine in Cedar City. The mine is Utah's last major link with its native state and namesake.

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