Smart Moves

The $672,000,000 Commercial Investment Trust Corp., world's biggest sales financier, last week jumped into a new and strange field: manufacturing. With six pages of mimeographed handout it announced outright purchase of Boston's 67-year-old Holtzer-Cabot Electric Co., producer of custom-made electric motors and appliances. Net cost to C.I.T.: $1,375,000.

Reason for the purchase: something had to be done to offset C.I.T.'s drop in installment-plan financing. With new-car sales taboo, used-car sales on the skids, and radios, refrigerators, etc. on the way out, C.I.T.'s first-half business dropped 50% to $433,000,000, a four-year low. This left C.I.T. with a lot of cash ($48,000,000 on June 30), plenty of ambition --and practically no place to go.

So C.I.T. started looking for an industrial outlet for its capital, picked Holtzer-Cabot because of its peacetime possibilities, its reputation for precision manufacturing, its backlog of war orders, its 1,300 highly skilled employes, its nifty earnings record. First thing C.I.T. did with its new baby was to jump everyone's wages 10%, assure all officers they would keep their jobs. C.I.T. intends to keep Holtzer-Cabot as a "permanent investment," will expand operations if things go right.

Commercial Credit Co., C.I.T.'s No. 1 rival, was also expansion-bent last week, bought a 95% stock interest in up-&-coming Pennsylvania Casualty Co. which took in $5,000,000 net premium income last year, will do better this year.

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