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Even now, there is some doubt whether the figures that Geneen is producing are all that precise as a guide to ITT's profitability. The company's earnings have benefited enormously from its acquisitions, particularly because ITT, like most conglomerates, uses the "pooling of interest" method of merger accounting. That allows a company that acquires another firm to count as its own all profits the acquired firm earns for the whole year, even if the acquisition is made late in the year. But how well have ITT's component companies done after they were acquired? That question...
...figures available for companies after acquisition by ITT indicate that they have maintained strong profit-growth rates of about 10% a year. But it is impossible to determine how much of that resulted from changes that ITT made in their accounting systems as soon as it took them over. Whenever Geneen's company has faced a choice between two accounting methods, it has selected the one that enables it to report the highest immediate profits. Depreciation, interest costs, changes in pension plans, investment tax credits, foreign exchange losses, to name only a few items -all are treated in ways...
High Risk. ITT has also chosen frequently to report as operating income gains from the sales of assets; a more conservative course would be to report such gains as nonoperating profit, or extraordinary income. An example is the $36 million that Hartford Fire Insurance earned last year by selling stocks from its investment portfolio. By counting the $36 million as operating profit, ITT inflated the picture of its operating success. All together, ITT last year reported as operating income more than $54 million in gains from sales of assets. Some expert accountants calculate that if ITT chose relatively conservative accounting...
...business manual lists 284 subsidiaries of ITT subsidiaries, but others are untabulated, and there are also subsidiaries of subsidiaries of subsidiaries, or sub-sub-subs. -Columnist Joseph Kraft nevertheless insisted last week that the Administration genuinely feared in the spring of 1971, when the economy and a number of overstretched Wall Street brokerage houses were in trouble, that an ITT-Hartford breakup would have hurt the economy badly enough to damage President Nixon's political stature...
...ITT has long sought to carve out a distinctive reputation as an enlightened, superbly coordinated international giant. To burnish its image, make friends and influence people, the company has put together a team of about 60 seasoned, high-priced specialists in public and Government relations and given them unusual scope to practice their craft. They are professional persuaders who try to woo the press, politicians, businessmen and anybody else who might be useful to the company. Except that it is somewhat larger and has more of a reputation for aggressiveness than most, ITT's public relations department is fairly...