Index 180 160 BRIDGEPORT BRASS COMPANY INDICES OF PHYSICAL PRODUCTION OF NONFERROUS METALS AND PRODUCTS, 140 120 100 80 60 1946 BRIDGE PORT BRASS COMPANY EFFECTIVE TAX RATES (COMBINED INCOME AND EXCESS PROFITS TAXES AS PERCENTAGES OF NET INCOME) FOR THE BRIDGEPORT BRASS COMPANY, ALL CORPORATIONS, AND FOUR LARGE INTEGRATED COPPER COMPANIES BRIDGEPORT BRASS COMPANY YEAR-END STOCKS OF REFINED COPPER IN THE UNITED STATES 50 Data for prior years are not available. 1950 BRIDGEPORT BRASS COMPANY RELATION OF AVERAGE BASE PERIOD NET INCOME OF ALL CORPORATIONS AND OF THE 1950 NET INCOMES ANNUALIZED (Second Quarter 1950 Annualized = 100) Index 500 450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 BRIDGEPORT BRASS COMPANY NET PROFIT TRENDS OF THE INDIANAPOLIS PLANT, THE COMPANY EXCLUDING (Indices: Second Quarter 1950= 100) Mr. JENKINS. All right, you may proceed. Mr. DAWSON. We appreciate the opportunity to tell your committee about the impact of the excess-profits tax and its extension on our particular company, which has been a growth company. Bridgeport Brass Co. has grown into a vigorous, expanding company, the largest independent in the brass-mill industry. It has been built on the foundations of a fine 87-year-old regional company, which for many years did no business farther west than Buffalo and concentrated in New England and the Northeast. In 1928, under the leadership of Herman W. Steinkraus, now its president, the company began to expand its sales activities on a national basis, and in the early thirties changed over from a family company to one now owned by some 9,000 stockholders. Today the company has four plants-the parent plants at Bridgeport, Conn.; a large mill at Indianapolis, Ind., with basic capacity equal to that of the Bridgeport mills; and a foundry at Exeter, N. H. We also have 12 warehouses and 29 district offices located across the country so that we can give prompt service to the technical requirements of our customers. These locations are in practically all of the home States of the members of your committee. We made an analysis of the growth in a number of the States represented by your committee and the growth in every single one has been very substantial. Our organization has grown to some 5,700 employees, and our employees, in our mind, have always been the most important part of our company. We have never had a strike. The teamwork and cooperation of the people in our organization is getting better all the time and our results before taxes demonstrate that. Our current payrolls are running at the rate of over $25 million a year. We make and sell a complete line of brass-mill products. They are in the form of sheet, rod, wire, and tube, and they have a very wide range of use, even wider than the range of use in the steel industry. In addition, we make some fabricated products such as plumbing goods, tire valves, and aerosol pressure-packaged products. Most of our growth has come since 1938. Our sales since that time have grown tenfold. In that year, 1938, we completed the first continuous rolling mill in the brass industry. Our sales were $13 million in 1938 and have increased to about $127 million in 1952, and our assets increased fourfold, from $12 million to over $53 million in 1952. After the war our facilities were doubled. The adjusted facilities increased from the beginning of 1946 through the end of 1948 from $7,213,000 to fourteen-million-eight-hundred-thousand-odd dollars. Since the end of the war our growth has been a vigorous one and it has taken several forms. We have had to replace and modernize our older plants in New England. It is a problem that is typical somewhat in the Northeast. We have also developed a fine new plant at Indianapolis, which was acquired in July 1948, which was late in the base period. Our sales followed this growth and they increased from fifty-sevenmillion-odd dollars in 1948 to over $126 million in 1952. Yet in this period our industry-the brass-mill industry-was doing poorly as compared with the growth in other industries. |