War Works for I. T. & T.

For years the $462,000,000 International Telephone and Telegraph Corp. helplessly watched the Axis overrun one of its properties after another, from France to Shanghai, watched its earnings nose-dive with each new blitz. But last week hawk-nosed, Virgin Island-born I. T. & T. President Sosthenes Behn released an annual report for 1943 which showed that the war is finally working for, instead of against, his globe-girdling behemoth.

Net income for the parent company, Mr. Behn reported, was $1,284,184 last year v. a deficit of $1,021,537 in 1942; on a consolidated basis it was $5,528,939 -- a cool two and a half times the previous year, and the highest since booming, peaceful 1937. Yet the consolidated figures not only excluded I. T. & T.'s European manufacturing subsidiaries (representing 16.6% of its total investments) and its Spanish telephone properties (22.5%), but also its two-thirds share in the net income of American Cable & Radio Corp., which earned a fat $1,389,503 in the first three quarters of 1943. A whopping 50% of consolidated earnings came from an I. T. & T. baby: Federal Telephone and Radio Corp. whose plants are busy with a $100,000,000 backlog of war orders.

Mr. Behn also reported another war-induced I. T. & T. bonanza: a mounting supply of U.S. dollar exchange building up in Latin America. Brazil and Chile, fat with dollars after many lean years, poured $1,425,494 of deferred debts into I.T.& T.'s coffers last year. Last week Sosthenes Behn was in Rio, preparing to back the new trend with more I. T. & T. millions for a skyscraper office building and a big new telephone factory. And in the Argentine, where the company controls 80% of the nation's telephone business, another new factory is almost completed.

But shrewd Mr. Behn long ago learned all about diversification. In case things go badly below the border, he has still another new project afoot: an I. T. & T. technical mission to help Russia rehabilitate her reconquered communications system. With talk of a $10 billion capital goods market in the U.S.S.R. after the war, an I. T. & T. technician on the ground floor today is the best possible advance agent for I. T. & T. equipment sales later on.

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