Lockheed Finance

"Look to Lockheed for leadership" is a slogan which zooming Lockheed Aircraft's President Robert Gross likes to underline in all his ads. Last week Bob Gross looked up from his billion-dollar backlog of fighters, bombers and Army transports long enough to announce a pioneering move to maintain Lockheed leadership in the postwar world: the purchase (for $3,750,000) of a controlling interest in the Pacific Finance Corp. of California.

Before San Francisco's hydra-headed Transamerica Corp. (see p. 78) took it over in 1941 and absorbed a good part of its installment-paper portfolio, Pacific Finance was the largest auto-finance company on the West Coast, with total loans of more than $100,000,000. Since the war, like all finance companies, its business has consisted largely in writing down its assets as auto owners paid for the cars they had bought before Detroit went to war.

If Lockheed's designers dream up an inexpensive passenger plane for what ex-Banker Bob Gross calls "the coming age of air," a Lockheed finance company would come in handy. If things work out well, Pacific might even take some transport-finance business away from commercial banks. And one of Lockheed's postwar bets is "Connie," the famed 52-passenger, four-motored stratosphere transport that flew its first test for the Army early this year (TIME, Jan. 18). Meanwhile, an additional capital investment should make Lockheed's huge tax bill look a little less like the national debt.

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