New Profit Champ

Most stock-minded followers of U. S. business judge companies by the dollars they earn for each share of their common stock. But steelmen have a score card all their own for the performance of each of the U. S.'s 15 leading steel companies. This is the dollars each earns per ton of ingot-making capacity.

Throughout the '305, profit-per-ton leadership shuttled back & forth between Chicago's Inland Steel and Pittsburgh's National Steel, spry mass-producers of flat steels. During those years, steel fans assumed that when the industry got back to 90% operations, profit-per-ton leadership would be captured by U. S. Steel and Bethlehem. Reason: each derives great leverage from its heavy (structural) steel capacity, cleans up when this last, higher-profit margin of its capacity goes to work. Last week U. S.'s and Bethlehem's leverage departments were at full blast, and their profits were multiplying in line with expectations. Items: for the first nine months of 1940, U. S. Steel made $3.33 per ton of capacity against 59-c- at the same time last year. Bethlehem made $3.97 per ton against only $1.34 for the same period last year.

But when the Wall Street Journal listed the profitmakers last week, steel fans got a surprise. First-place honors went neither to U. S. (fifth) nor Bethlehem (third), but to a steel company just two years old, Allegheny-Ludlum Steel Corp. Up from $1.51 a ton in long's first nine months to $6.16 a ton this year were Allegheny-Ludlum's profits. Reason:

Allegheny-Ludlum's capacity (for nine months) is only 451,500 tons (U. S. Steel's is 20,846,250 tons, Bethlehem's 8,601,600 tons), but almost every ton of it is specialized for making high-cost, hand-tailored alloy steels. These are not ordered from a catalogue or mass-produced at the mill, but compounded like doctors' prescriptions to minute specifications. This year, capacity operations in such industries as automobile, machine-tool, chemical and electrical-equipment makers, plus the aircraft and arsenal boom, are making a seller's market for high-cost alloy steels. To Allegheny-Ludlum went all the velvet, none of the worry.

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