• U.S.

Corporations: In the Front Seat

4 minute read
TIME

Hardly an American is now alive who has not come in contact with the products of American Seating Co., the Grand Rapids, Mich., firm that is the largest U.S. manufacturer of seats for schools, churches, theaters, ball parks and buses. And with their ever-larger families and fundaments* requiring more and wider chairs, Americans have turned AmSeCo’s business into a hot growth industry.

Last week, as a reflection of his broadening market, AmSeCo President James Marinus VerMeulen, 56, reported that his company’s sales for the first half of 1961 were $16.5 million, up 3.7% over the same period last year. And the big profits for 1961 are still to come because 50% of AmSeCo’s production each year is shipped in the summer months to meet the fall openings of schools, churches and theaters. (In 1960, with first-half sales of only $15.9 million, the company wound up the year with a record $42 million.) One Wall Street broker estimates that AmSeCo’s earnings ($2.77 per share last year) will hit $3 this year and $3.70 next.

Enter Competition. Before World War II AmSeCo, biggest in a small field, was responsible for most of the unyielding cast-iron and maple school desks that have set generations of U.S. children to squirming. But in the postwar rush to build schools, the company’s competitors have quadrupled in number. Among them is one of the decade’s glamour companies, Brunswick Corp. (TIME, Nov. 28), which since 1953 has carved out for itself 22% of the classroom seating market, second only to AmSeCo’s 35-40%.

Competition has turned the school market into a hot battle to sell at the lowest price, which plays right into VerMeulen’s speciality: cost cutting through automation. A strapping Michigan Dutchman, VerMeulen joined AmSeCo as an upholstery inspector upon his graduation from Michigan’s Hope College. He decided early that he liked the company so well that he wanted to be president of it. Three years ago he at last succeeded Harry M. Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver), who had been president for 29 years.

Exit Waste. Even in the Taliaferro days, it was young VerMeulen who mechanized the AmSeCo foundry back in 1930. Automation is now so prevalent that plant ceilings are a tangle of intricate conveyors that look like a routing man’s nightmare. The company employs 500 fewer workers than it did in 1926 when it was a fraction of today’s size, and its standard chair-desk sells for just over $12 v. more than $13 ten years ago.

AmSeCo set up years ago one of industry’s first testing and research labs that now helps it keep its edge over competition. In the AmSeCo torture chamber, a swivel chair gets 200,000 swivels before it is pronounced serviceable, fabrics are doused with artificial perspiration, and all upholstered chairs must withstand Squirming Irma—a wooden model of a human buttocks that wriggles lifelike in the seat. Out of the lab come new products, some of which take the company beyond the glutens maximus. Items:

¶A line of hospital furniture (distributed by American Hospital Supply Co.), which includes a bed that can be moved up and down electrically by the patient.

¶ An Electronic Learning Center for teaching such subjects as languages and remedial reading; each student occupies a separate booth, with earphones and microphones hooked into a central console operated by the teacher.

¶ Upholstered auditorium seats that, when not needed, can be folded into a wall in units of seven rows.

As the best established firm in a burgeoning field, AmSeCo has lately been showered with merger and acquisition proposals. VerMeulen and his board consider every offer, but thus far will have none. Says VerMeulen: “I’d like to take this company even further on its own.”

*The World War II G.I. averaged 1½ in. taller and 15 lbs. heavier than the World War I doughboy.

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