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Last year Xerox showed a 21.8% profit increase over 1966—for the sixth straight year of 20%-plus profits growth. Only because the company set aside cash for an anticipated 10% tax surcharge did 1968 first-quarter earnings rise a mere 12.7% over the same period last year. Not even Xerox expects to keep duplicating such successes forever. More than a dozen competitors have come into the copying field. Among them is the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, which is now testing a machine that can make color copies in one minute.
Making the Most. One of Wilson's better products has been President McColough. A native of Halifax, Nova Scotia, McColough served in the Royal Navy in World War II, got a Harvard Business School degree in 1949, quickly decided that "business is more interesting in the U.S. than in Canada." He almost changed his mind in 1954 when, after five years with small Lehigh Coal & Navigation Co., he went for a job interview at Xerox (then Haloid). "It wasn't very impressive," McColough recalls. "I went up to see one of the vice presidents and he had a workman's black lunch pail on his desk and his bookshelf was a painted orange crate." Then he listened to Wilson's spiel about xerography. "It was all promise and no performance," McColough says, "but I was taken with the opportunities."
Salesman McColough, who built up what is now a 7,800-man nationwide marketing force, made the most of those opportunities, and was rewarded with the presidency two years ago. For the future, McColough plans to work on cutting costs and expanding Xerox' duplicating business at home and copier sales abroad, where the market is growing much faster than the U.S. rate of 15% a year.