Word: bic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...persistent European notion that U.S. antitrust and securities laws are somehow stacked against foreign operations (they are not). But the main drawing card is that the U.S. market is still the world's biggest and most profitable. Describing his own experience last June, Marcel Bich, whose Bic pen company bought out Waterman Pen Co. in 1959, could hardly contain himself. "The States, it is tough," he declared. "But when it works, it pays!" Bich has long since recouped his $10 million investment in Waterman, last year cleared $6.4 million...
...Dash soap man butts into conversations and flings laundry at innocent people. "Louise Hexter," he commands, "start wearing cleaner blouses!" The shaming, the touch of half-suppressed hysteria, is unsettling. Another instance of the absurd involves the flamenco dancer who stomps the living daylights out of a Bic ballpoint pen that has been attached to his heel. Here the effect is different. One remembers all the other similar nonsense the pen that writes under water, the watch that survives a trip on the rudder of an ocean liner and one inevitably begins to speculate in grudging fascination about what they...
...chief ministers arose for the final action choice, though, I had a subtle premonition of disaster. But it was too late for any further discussion; our paths were definitively chosen. Nervously I chewed the end of my Bic pen and waited for the speeches to begin...
Last week Adler spread out with a new subsidiary, Bic Pen of Canada, Ltd., which has built a $400,000 plant in Toronto. His aim: to win nearly half of the 200-million-ballpoint-pen Canadian market within three years. Brash though that seems, it only matches the hustle by which Adler last year sold U.S. buyers 480 million ballpoint pens, almost all of them use-and-discard models priced from 19? to 49? retail. Adler keeps a quarter of his 300 plant employees busy checking the quality of parts coming off automated production lines, personally scrutinizes the daily writing...
...told him, 'You've cut expenses as much as you can,' " says Adler. " 'What you need is sales.' " Bich immediately made Adler executive vice president, and after sales pushed the company into the black, Adler became president at 31. Today Waterman-Bic is the biggest link in the French manufacturer's worldwide network of 18 plants producing 3,000,000 pens a day for 96 countries...