Word: matchan
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Such U.S. corporations as Litton In dustries and Textron, which began play ing the game in the early 1950s (long before the term conglomerate became popular), could argue with that, but Matchan may have a record of sorts...
Having made it selling for Max (and later for Revlon), Matchan set off at age 40 to make lipstick cases on his own, soon hit on his formula for a con glomerate. The key was Cope Allman, a down-and-out Birmingham maker of brass bedsteads, which he bought for its major asset: a stock-exchange list ing. By floating new issues and a lot of publicity, Matchan was able to finance a flood of plants beyond England (where his company now accounts for 90% of lipstick-case output) to France (100%), Australia (80%) and elsewhere. With other companies...
women's fashions. Matchan grabbed a chance to stake a claim of his own. "I started all this conglomeration business eleven years ago," said he, "whereas you people only cottoned to it about a year...
...from Bedsteads. For its boss, Cope Allman also pours forth a salary that, at $112,000 a year, is second only to Flour Tycoon Joseph Rank's ($117,600) in Britain. Unlike most British corporate chiefs, Matchan paved his way to the top not on the playing fields of Eton but at London amuse ment parks and movie lots. The son of a sewing-machine repairman, Matchan parlayed a modest talent for figures and an immodest one for braggadocio into a youthful career as a "financial ad viser" to showfolk. At 25, he landed a bookkeeping job with...
...pounder, little of it muscle, Matchan commutes by private helicopter to his home on the isle of Jersey, one of Britain's semiautonomous Channel Islands, where he lives in noisy defiance of mainland inheritance taxes ("they offend my nostrils"). With his 96% stockholding, he runs Cope Allman with a spare, 25-man head-office staff "because I dislike middle management and all that sort of thing," likes to make patriarchal, publicity-grabbing visits to the firm's 15,000 worldwide employees. He frankly favors a personality cult as good management policy, "as long as the personality doesn...