Conglomerate, London-Style

Most businessmen credit U.S. merg er makers with the invention of cor porate conglomerates -- companies that grow by garnering others in unrelated fields. Not Britain's Leonard J. Matchan, 55, president and chairman of London-based Cope Allman Interna tional Ltd., who was in New York City last week to plug a venture in U.S.

women's fashions. Matchan grabbed a chance to stake a claim of his own. "I started all this conglomeration business eleven years ago," said he, "whereas you people only cottoned to it about a year ago."

Such U.S. corporations as Litton In dustries and Textron, which began play ing the game in the early 1950s (long before the term conglomerate became popular), could argue with that, but Matchan may have a record of sorts.

Since 1956, he has spun together no fewer than 150 companies. They range in size from 14 to 1,400 employees, have plants in 13 countries, serve mar kets in 70. Pouring forth products from tires and car wax to cosmetics and steel, Cope Allman last year earned $8.9 million on sales of $168 million.

Up from Bedsteads. For its boss, Cope Allman also pours forth a salary that, at $112,000 a year, is second only to Flour Tycoon Joseph Rank's ($117,600) in Britain. Unlike most British corporate chiefs, Matchan paved his way to the top not on the playing fields of Eton but at London amuse ment parks and movie lots. The son of a sewing-machine repairman, Matchan parlayed a modest talent for figures and an immodest one for braggadocio into a youthful career as a "financial ad viser" to showfolk. At 25, he landed a bookkeeping job with Max Factor when the U.S. cosmetics maker entered the British market. In twelve years, Mat chan 1) helped wash away the prewar Victorian notion that lipstick was not for English ladies, and 2) became the company's European general manager.

Having made it selling for Max (and later for Revlon), Matchan set off at age 40 to make lipstick cases on his own, soon hit on his formula for a con glomerate. The key was Cope Allman, a down-and-out Birmingham maker of brass bedsteads, which he bought for its major asset: a stock-exchange list ing. By floating new issues and a lot of publicity, Matchan was able to finance a flood of plants beyond England (where his company now accounts for 90% of lipstick-case output) to France (100%), Australia (80%) and elsewhere. With other companies (in printing, plastics, metalworking, warehousing) coming in along the way, Cope Allman's sales have multiplied more than a hundredfold in a decade.

A 238-pounder, little of it muscle, Matchan commutes by private helicopter to his home on the isle of Jersey, one of Britain's semiautonomous Channel Islands, where he lives in noisy defiance of mainland inheritance taxes ("they offend my nostrils"). With his 96% stockholding, he runs Cope Allman with a spare, 25-man head-office staff "because I dislike middle management and all that sort of thing," likes to make patriarchal, publicity-grabbing visits to the firm's 15,000 worldwide employees. He frankly favors a personality cult as good management policy, "as long as the personality doesn't get too far from the cult."

Back to Women. So that it won't, Matchan now has staffers working on "deconglomerating my conglomeration." Over the past 18 months, a score of companies have been sold off; others are being parceled into separate divisions, most of which will eventually be publicly owned, thus aping the style of such U.S. models as Texas' Ling-Temco-Vought.

The latest division represents a sort of return to first principles. Coming full circle from the original leap into lipsticks, Cope Allman got a fashion division under way with a $1,000,000 order for women's wear from the Soviet Union after Premier Kosygin's London visit last spring. On last week's trip to New York, a squad of models strutting his "over 25" styles came along to sew up more orders with a fashion show aboard the docked liner Queen Elizabeth. "It's a good depression hedge," he says. "I pin my faith on anything to do with the ladies."

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