Room for One More

Detroit's Bendix Corp. is probably best known for a product it has never made. Confusing the $742 million science and aerospace company with the makers of the old Bendix washer,* housewives telephone company headquarters asking for repairmen to fix their washing machines. Bendix Corp. makes just about everything else, though, from bicycle brakes to missile-tracking systems. It embraces 373 different product lines, 28 divisions, nine U.S. subsidiaries and 22 affiliated companies in ten countries. Last week the company drew yet another operation under its wing: for $5,300,000 worth of stock, it acquired Besly-Welles Corp., an Illinois machine-tool maker that had 1964 sales of $11.5 million.

Competing Within. For all its diversification, Bendix can stand more. The Pentagon's 17th largest prime contractor and an even more important subcontractor (Government business accounts for 64% of its volume), it was hard hit last year by cutbacks in the defense program, saw sales drop to their lowest point in five years. The push for more nongovernment business has been stepped up by a new top management team that took over five months ago. The team: A. P. (for Athanas Paul) Fontaine, 60, the chairman and chief executive officer, and George E. Stoll, 58, president and chief operating officer. Both longtime up-through-the-ranks employees, they have tightened cost controls, informed division heads that they will use Bendix' incentive bonus program to reward good producers and punish poor ones. Result: earnings rose 22% in the April-June period, are up 10% overall so far this year.

Bendix' management faces the constant problem of trying to bring some order out of the company's diversity. Salesmen from separate Bendix divisions with virtually the same product occasionally wind up fighting for the same customer. Two divisions, for example, are competing to sell flight control systems to the major aircraft manufacturers. Bendix maintains that it thus offers a customer alternatives, calls the system "planned internal competition." But it still has to hold regular monthly meetings of division heads to iron out the conflicts.

Reaching Deep. The common denominator for most Bendix activity is the company's specialization in guidance and control systems. Some Bendix control component is a part of every major missile in the U.S. arsenal. With Boeing, Bendix has developed an all-weather computerized navigation and landing system for jets; it has also developed special roving vehicles for unmanned exploration of the moon and a moving lunar laboratory (MOLAB) out of which astronauts will operate while on the moon.

To reach deep under the sea as well as far into space, Bendix four months ago bought Pasadena's $16 million United Geophysical Corp., a firm that searches the ocean floor for petroleum and minerals. Through its automotive division, the company already sells $154 million worth of brakes, carburetors, pumps and power steering systems. By acquiring Besly-Welles, it will also be able to start selling the drills, grinders and metal-cutting tools used in making auto parts. Even now it is going a logical step further and negotiating to buy some of the smaller manufacturers that supply spare parts to Detroit.

*Made by the independent Bendix Home Appliances, Inc., which sold out to Avco in 1950, was in turn sold to Philco. The Bendix brand name has disappeared.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.