Word: bp
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...government plans to dispose of 17% of BP's common stock?possibly to British institutional investors, possibly to foreign buyers (Iran is reportedly interested). The sale is expected to raise about $840 million, which the government sorely needs; it must reduce the budget deficit in order to qualify for a $3.9 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. The transaction will still leave the government holding 51% of BP?at least if British courts let the Bank of England hang on to a 21.5% block of BP stock that it picked up two years ago in a bailout of cash...
Profitable Empire. Nonetheless, the left-wing fury is understandable. The Labor government came to power pledged to extend nationalization of basic industries; now it will be surrendering a large chunk of perhaps the most profitable investment any British government has ever made. FORTUNE ranks BP fifth among the seven international oil companies?the so-called Seven Sisters ?with sales in 1975 of $17 billion. From London, Chairman David Steel, an affable Oxford-educated lawyer who is a tough negotiator, oversees a global empire. It embraces more than 650 production, refining and marketing subsidiaries in Europe, the Middle East...
More important, BP's profit prospects are bright. The company, hit hard by global recession, registered the lowest profits of any of the seven international oil giants in 1975?$336 million. In last year's first nine months, profit rose less than 6%. Estimates are that earnings will more than triple this year and will rise a further 60% or more in 1978.* Reflecting these great expectations, BP common has almost tripled since the start of 1975, to $13.44, making it Britain's hottest industrial stock...
...same editors and staff as WWD, and virtually every word and photo that appears in W is lifted from or destined for the daily. Thus the pages of W are filled with the same movie previews, fashion spreads, profiles, food and home-decorating articles, and Beautiful People (BP, of course) as its diurnal sister-if somewhat fewer of them-and all written in similarly breathless prose (Jacqueline Onassis is "mystique mingled with mystery-maybe even sorcery"). About the only thing that W does not pick up from WWD is the daily's daily hamper of garment-industry news, though...
...haut snobisme is denied by Fairchild, 48, a boyish-looking father of four, enthusiastic skier and sometime socializer with many of the BP in W's pages. "There is no such thing as good or bad taste, except in the eyes of a snob," he says. "The real thing is quality. For instance, the Swiss Federal Railroad has quality because it's clean and it works. Quality People are people who do things, not people who lead idle lives. Sure, we do write about a dream world sometimes. But there are real things in the world that...