On the Up & Up

As rosy first-quarter earnings reports continued to pour out last week, the rosiest came from General Motors. President Harlow Curtice reported that arms orders and the biggest production of cars and trucks since 1950 had brought G.M. sales to $2.5 billion, an alltime high rate of $10 billion a year. The gross was up 42.6% from a year ago, and net profits were up 18.7% to $151,261,876.

Studebaker was not so fortunate. Harassed by tooling troubles in the production of its sporty new model, the corporation reported a net loss of $984,489 v. $4,862,149 profit last year. But with production up to 92% of capacity, President Harold S. Vance said that the company should be well in the black in the current quarter.

Studebaker's loss was one of the big exceptions to the trend. Of 386 big companics which had reported by last week, 73.8% showed profits averaging 9.8% higher than last year. Items:

P:In the petroleum industry, Standard Oil (N.J.) saw its profits drop 4.5% to $126 million. But Socony-Vacuum had a 7.3% gain to $44 million. The net profits of Standard Oil of California ($42,016,-201), Texas Co. ($42,681,806) and Gulf ($35,629,000) remained about the same.

P: Aviation sales and profits were soaring. On 37.9% higher sales, United Aircraft's net climbed about 65% to an estimated $5.5 million. North American's earnings went up 56.8% to $2,650,000 and Curtiss-Wright's 38.4% to $2,445,642. Glenn L. Martin Co., which lost $669,606 last winter, cleared $1,754,079. Some of the airlines did even better.

American boosted its net 92% to $1,889,000, and Eastern's earnings increased the same amount to $1,858,975. Even T.W.A., which usually loses money in the first three months of the year when its east-west traffic slows down, managed to cut its losses slightly to $1,326,191.

P: In the steel industry, record sales of $927,925,909 increased U.S. Steel's net 13.4% to $49,375,958. Republic's net jumped 17% to $13,759,513 and Jones & Laughlin's 19.8% to $5,642,000. Biggest gainer of all was Bethlehem, which reported sales up 7.3% to a record $500,407,927 and earnings up 63.6% to $30,961,033. But though steelmakers' earnings were good, none of the companies thought they were good enough to absorb an industry wage increase (see above) or higher costs. Said Bethlehem's Chairman Eugene G. Grace: "Since the war, we have now spent in construction something over $600 million, and it's about time we were getting some benefits from it."

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