Winning Wallflower

Like a wallflower at the country club ball, Ogden Corp. remained relatively unnoticed among the conglomerates that flourished in the '60s. Despite its relative anonymity, though, Ogden is among the 100 biggest corporations in the country--a scrap metal-shipbuilding-food service empire that generates annual sales of more than $1 billion. It also has recovered more rapidly from ill fortune than many farther-famed conglomerates.

Ogden's earnings plummeted about 55% in 1969, but in the next three years they climbed back up. In 1972 profits rose more than $5,000,000, to $32 million. The company resumed paying dividends in December 1971 after a year-and-a-half suspension. Even so, investors remain chary of conglomerates, and by the end of last week, Ogden's stock was still dawdling at $13 a share, down from a onetime high of $52.

The company's turnaround is largely the result of a reorganization that has shaped a jumble of about 200 subsidiaries into four major divisions: metals, transportation, leisure and food production. Top managers who were slow to adjust were eased out, and losing properties, notably a smorgasbord of restaurants, were dumped. During the retrenchment, Chairman Ralph E. Ablon all but halted expansion into new fields.

A major drain on Ogden was its Avondale Shipyards near New Orleans, which during the 1960s made unusually low bids to gain Navy-destroyer contracts and then saw costs soar. In 1969 the yard suffered a loss of $3.8 million. Ogden has since gathered the shipyard, its prosperous shipping business, which operates 20 vessels, and a stevedoring firm into a single transportation division, and last year the yard showed a small profit. Now Avondale expects to cash in big by helping to relieve the nation's growing fuel shortage. It is increasing production of liquefied-natural-gas tankers that sell for $100 million each to transport gas from Algeria, Indonesia and elsewhere to the U.S.

Another headache for Ogden was ABC Consolidated, a food-service firm that sells sandwiches, soft drinks, popcorn and other snacks in thousands of moviehouses, factories and sports centers, including the cavernous Pittsburgh Civic Arena. It also operates two snackbar chains, Nedick's in New York City and Doggie Diners in San Francisco. ABC, which Ogden acquired in 1967, quickly overexpanded into full-service restaurants and in 1970 lost almost $5,000,000. "We eventually identified $40 million worth of business that was not worth having," says Ablon. Ogden sold off the losers and raised earnings by folding ABC into its leisure group, which among other things runs five race tracks including Suffolk Downs in Massachusetts. Noting the increasing concern of businessmen about the rapid rise in industrial crime, Ogden last year added a new subsidiary to its leisure group: Ogden Security Inc., which already has contracts to provide guard and electronic-alarm services to Polaroid Corp. and the Prudential Center in Boston.

As if Ogden did not have troubles enough, its major food-processing firm, Tillie Lewis Foods of Stockton, Calif., was hard hit by the Government ban on cyclamate sweeteners, a key ingredient of its canned fruit and vegetable line. After suffering a loss in 1969, Lewis switched into the weight-control market with the low-calorie Tasti Diet line of canned goods. Tasti Diet has been a winner from the start, and last year the food division posted profits of $6.5 million.

One area needing little attention was the metals division, which provides more than half the company's profits and almost a third of its revenues. The keystone of this division is Luria Bros. & Co., the world's largest scrap-metal firm. Ablon, a onetime business instructor at Ohio State who came to Ogden from Luria in 1962, is satisfied with the conglomerate's progress but far from smug about it. Having got Ogden moving again, Ablon dryly remarks: "The most positive thing we can do now is not to blow it."

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