California's Edgar Kaiser, 56, is an uncommonly sentimental tycoon. Whenever he sees his father, the legendary Henry J. Kaiser, 82, he greets the old man with a warm hug and a kiss. Two weeks ago, when Edgar was decorated with Brazil's Order of the Southern Cross, the tears flowed freely down his cheeks. On business matters, however, Edgar Kaiser is eminently dry-eyed. Finally stepping out of his father's long shadow, he has taken full charge of the family's 100-company empire and spread the business into 40 countries on six continents. Last week, as the last of their major companies reported for 1964, the Kaisers toted up profits of $46 million on sales of $1.3 billion. For their major manufacturing arms, it was the brightest year since Henry J. started making steel, building ships and breaking production records in 1941.
Rising on Risks. Next week Edgar Kaiser will jet from his headquarters in Oakland, Calif., to Venezuela, where Kaiser engineers head a consortium of companies from five nations that is building the $137 million Guri Dam. Meanwhile, Kaiser Aluminum is busy putting up new plants in West Berlin, Turkey and Japan. Kaiser Steel has just closed the largest trade deal in Australia's history: with a local partner, it will sell $600 million worth of iron ore to Japan over the next 15 years. Kaiser Cement & Gypsum this month opened a mill in Florida, and later this year will start up another in New Jersey, thus invading the eastern U.S. market.
Like his father, Edgar rushes in where the timid fear to tread, following the company's slogan—"Find a need, and fill it." Optimism is the cornerstone of the Kaiser philosophy, and Edgar argues with folksy persuasion that the world's needs are bound to rise so fast that he would be foolish not to try to meet them.
Such a philosophy obviously has built-in risks. Kaiser has taken on an extraordinarily heavy debt load, which both limits the payment of cash dividends and makes the company vulnerable to any severe recession in the future. Last year his engineers lost $16 million, largely because a Kaiser dam in Greece was washed out by floods. A dike-building project in Israel was damaged when the Dead Sea overflowed—for the first time since the days of Moses. Other businessmen often wonder why Kaiser is deeply committed in such unpredictable areas as Latin America (where Kaiser-Willys is the continent's biggest auto producer), or India (where Kaiser operates the country's largest aluminum plant), or Ghana (where Kaiser is building the $196 million Volta Dam and an aluminum plant that will be served by it). To such questioning, Edgar gives a disarming answer: "How are you ever going to give these people the opportunity to know us unless you work with them?"