The Zipper King

One day in 1923, a Japanese school boy named Tadao Yoshida ran across a seemingly bland maxim of Andrew Carnegie's, which he remembers as: "Unless you render profit and goodness to others, you cannot prosper." Inspired by it, Yoshida eventually derived his own rule for running a company: one-third of potential profit should be sacrificed in order to hold down prices, another third should be used to help customers with discounts and rebates, and only the final third should be retained as "pure profit."

Yoshida, now 65, insists that he still follows that formula, and it has made his company, YKK Manufacturing, the world's largest zipper maker. This year it will produce 500,200 miles of zippers, more than enough to stretch to the moon and back. Sales have grown from a pathetic $170 in 1934, YKK's first year, to $475 million in 1973.

In 1974 they are expected to hit $625 million, on which Yoshida looks for a "pure profit" of 9%, or $56 million. More of those profits will belong to employees than to Yoshida; the company's 13,000 workers in Japan have acquired almost two-thirds of the stock through a generous profit-sharing plan.

Yoshida now plans to extend the same largesse to foreign employees -- because, he explains, "all along we have tried to inculcate a sense of being a part of the YKK family." Profit sharing will soon be offered to 80 YKK workers in Canada, then to 400 in the U.S. and 3,500 in 27 other countries round the world.

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