Feast in the Famine

Pound for pound, the most wanted metal in the U.S. today is nickel. Last week it commanded the highest premium paid for any metal on the grey market--$3 a lb., five times the going rate. With Government stockpiles and defense users gobbling up 40% of the free world's total output (v. only 10% for copper), automakers alone had to pay out more than $21 million last year in grey market premiums for the precious hardener for bumpers, crankshafts and a dozen other parts. The shortage is so critical that the Administration, while getting out of business elsewhere, is expanding nickel output at its Cuban Nicaro plant by 75%. To placate civilian industry, the Pentagon even had to divert 24 million Ibs. of nickel from its stockpiles to civilian use last year, has already funneled out another 12 million Ibs. in the first quarter of 1956.

This famine is proving a feast for the free world's biggest nickel producer, the 54-year-old International Nickel Co. of Canada, Ltd., which provides 65% of the free world's nickel. Last week Inco announced net profits of $91.5 million for !955, up 40% over 1954. For the sixth successive year, production hit a new peak with nickel deliveries of 290 million Ibs., while the company also delivered 263 million Ibs. of copper (worth $100 million), 1.637,000 Ibs. of cobalt (worth $4 million), 445,000 oz. of platinum (worth $20 million), plus smaller amounts of gold, silver, selenium and tellurium.

Boom & Bust. All of Inco's production came from its famed mines near Sudbury, Ont., where the company has drilled a 396-mile spiderweb of underground tunnels fanning out through five mines. Sudbury is to nickel what Minnesota's Mesabi Range is to iron, at one time supplied more than 80% of the free world's nickel. But the credit for making it pay off goes to a pair of hardheaded metalmen with the know-how and vision to turn nickel into one of the world's most important minerals: Inco's onetime President and Chairman Robert Crooks Stanley, who died in 1951, and present Board Chair man Dr. John Thompson, 75, a Columbia School of Mines Ph.D. who joined the company on graduating in 1906.

In the early days nickel was almost entirely a war baby, whose greatest value was for armor-piercing shells and armor plate. Inco gyrated between boom and bust, went from a $10 million profit in 1917 to an $800,000 deficit in 1921 when defense needs slacked off, and the company actually had to shut down for twelve months, Stanley and Thompson worked years to find peacetime uses for the fabulous nickel lode, helped develop heavy-duty nickel steels for dozens of products, taught businessmen new ways to use nickel in household equipment, autos, steel and other products.

Rivers & Customers. Today, with Thompson in overall command and the operating reins turned over to President Henry S. Wingate, 51, another old hand at the game, Inco is looking far and wide for new deposits to supply the growing demand. Though the Sudbury lode may last at least another 50 years, Inco spent over $5,000,000 last year on exploration from Canada to Australia, has a fleet of five planes, equipped with sensitive electromagnetic instruments, constantly buzzing over wilderness areas looking for new deposits of ore. "What we usually discover," says President Wingate dryly, "is only something like an underground river." However, there is a possibility of mining a new ore body in the Mystery Lake region of Manitoba, where Inco prospectors have proved up 50 million tons of low-grade ore.

Paradoxically, while Inco searches for more nickel its nagging worry is still a possible surplus. Says Wingate: "With so much nickel going for defense, the danger is that with a sudden thaw in the cold war, much of the nickel now used may suddenly be released to civilians. If this happened, we might be faced with an oversupply that would last for five years." To prepare for such a shift in demand, Inco is busy devising still more peacetime uses for nickel, keeps a 750-man research staff busy in the laboratories and a sales crew out in the field looking for new customers. Says Wingate: "We want to be ready when the time comes."

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