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¶ Long-headed grocers, cramming their shelves against a rise in food prices, helped General Foods make $3,680,000 in the March quarter last year. With buying "more nearly normal" in the first three months of this year. General Foods' profits were down to $3,361,000. C. Edward J. Cornish, dour president of National Lead Co., told his stockholders last week that March quarter business was the best for that period since 1930. President Cornish declared that he could easily raise prices but that he preferred not to "squeeze" consumers. Profits from European operations were currently better than from those in the U. S. C. In a brief preliminary report, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. announced that March quarter profits amounted to about 85¢ per share of common stock as against 90¢ in the same period of last year.
¶ Benefiting from the slight pick-up in building, Johns-Manville Corp. operated in the black for the first March quarter since 1931. Profits were $246,000 as against a loss of $76,000 in the same three months of 1934 and a loss of $953,000 in the March quarter of 1933.
¶Better building also helped Otis Elevator turn a loss of $252,000 in the 1934 initial quarter into a nominal profit in the same period this year.
Total profits of the first 1,136 industrial corporations to report for 1934 were $982,000,000, an increase of 54% over the $635,000,000 earned by the same companies in 1933. Only important industrial groups losing ground last year were leather & shoes, sugar, textile & apparel, aircraft, shipping & shipbuilding. Even including utilities, which showed a 6% decline in profits, and railroads, which operated at a deficit, the net increase in U. S. corporate profits for the second year of the New Deal was a clear 25%.
Reports for 1934 are still dribbling in. Coca-Cola's common stock jumped ten points to $206 per share one day last week on news that last year's earnings were even more than expected—$14,300,000 as against $10,800,000 the year before. Standard Oil Co. of California reported profits up from $7,500,000 in 1933 to $18,300,000 last year. Colgate-Palmolive-Peet's profits increased tenfold to $3,744,000.*
A different story, however, was the report of Amoskeag Manufacturing Co., biggest cotton textile producer in New England. The famed old Manchester, N. H. concern was once again in the red by $1,000,000 even without any allowance for depreciation. Blamed was the decline of the New England cotton business. Boston's Frederic Christopher Dumaine, Amoskeag's treasurer and real boss, declared: "Nearly 1,000,000 New England spindles have gone to the scrap heap in the last few weeks. ... No management is competent to operate a plant like this, handicapped with . . . $2.56 [per week] average wage differential, which is particularly fatal to us as we have no mills in the South. . . . The two shift policy helps neither owners nor workers. . . . Until night work is stopped, neither the South nor the North will prosper. Domestic consumption does not warrant it, and our foreign market is vanishing."