Word: morrison
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Compete." Today, Harry Morrison runs an empire of 36 subsidiaries, eleven other companies, has more than 3,660 pieces of heavy equipment. MK's 1953 gross totaled $287 million, its profits a record $5,761,000, an impressive figure in an industry where competitive bids often shave profits paper-thin. Besides heavy basic construction, M-K is now expanding into factories and laboratories. In 1950, M-K bought 98% of Cleveland's H. K. Ferguson Co., one of the top U.S. constructors of industrial buildings, for $2,650,000, has put it to work on Pittsburgh...
Under the M-K banner, Ferguson has shifted from a conservative fixed-fee (cost plus a set profit) operation to a more competitive unit-cost (one price for the job) contract. Says Morrison: "A business isn't worth a damn unless you get out and compete." In the first year under Morrison, Ferguson's gross climbed from $27.8 million to $73 million (net: more than $1,000,000), and its backlog jumped from $20 million to $85 million...
...Harry Morrison's real love is the heavy, earth-moving work of basic construction. The industry is booming and construction men hope happily that they will never quite catch up with mankind's pressing needs...
...Like Morrison, dozens of other U.S. builders are working around the globe. From the West Coast, Alhambra, Calif.'s C. F. Braun & Co. has gone to Australia to build a $25 million refinery for Standard-Vacuum Refining Co.; the Ralph M. Parsons Co. of Los Angeles has five projects abuilding in Japan, three in India, three more in Turkey and Iran, others in Sweden, England, Canada, Alaska, Hawaii and Colombia. San Francisco's Bechtel Corp. has been in Venezuela building the Cerro Bolivar iron-ore development (TIME, June 1) for U.S. Steel, is now on the other side...
Ambassadors at Work. Morrison-Knudsen leads them all. Last week an M-K crew was in the Brazilian jungle expanding the Cubatao hydroelectric project to give the city of São Paulo 400,000 more kilowatts of electric power. On the $20 million job, M-K men were boring a 3,500-ft. river-diversion tunnel, blasting a huge underground powerhouse from the bowels of a mountain. The air was blue with humidity; the sides of the cavern dripped water; every so often, a chunk of rock broke loose, came crashing down like a thunderbolt in a closet...