Word: nordhoff
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Though the success of West Germany's Volkswagen has been one of postwar Europe's most glittering economic achievements, aggressive Chairman Heinz Nordhoff, 64, feels that a moment of relaxation by his company could be fatal. "What an auto company loses in the market today," says Nordhoff, "it probably can't recover in the next 50 years." To keep Volkswagen from slipping-it is now the world's third biggest automaker, after General Motors and Ford-Nordhoff plans to spend $375-500 million on expansion in the next five years, lift Volkswagen's annual capacity...
Despite West Germany's current economic slowdown, German industry's most famous product is still speeding along fast enough to puncture a few egos in Detroit. In a letter to his shareholders last week, Volkswagen Chairman Heinz Nordhoff, 63, announced that the company's 1962 sales seem certain to reach $1.4 billion-a 25% increase over 1961. The total number of Volkswagens produced this year will be well over a million, which will put VW second only to G.M.'s Chevrolet Division as the world's biggest producer of a single make of auto. Biggest...
...with. On the morning of April 28, 1789, goes one version of the story. Captain William Bligh of H.M.S. Bounty refused to give a drink of water to a dying man and his crew staged a mutiny. The incident inspired a trilogy of bestselling novels (1932-34) by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, and a supercolossal saga of the sea (1935) starring Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh. In 1959, figuring that the public was ready to stretch its sea legs again, M-G-M decided to refloat The Bounty. So the wind blew...
...using so much of their past earnings for current expansion, many German firms have also left themselves with dangerously small capital reserves. Undercapitalization caused the-recent downfall of Shipbuilding Tycoon Willy Schlieker. Heinz Nordhoff, the boss of mighty Volkswagen, thinks his company's reserves of less than $150 million are too small for a company with annual sales of more than $1.3 billion. To carry out adequate expansion and modernization programs, German industry as a whole needs an estimated $7.5 billion that it does not have...
Neither U.S. industry nor U.S. labor should fear free trade, Nordhoff argued. "Competition has made this country great. American competition will help make Europe great also." And then he gently suggested that maybe U.S. industry was not as alertly competitive as it might be. "This has been demonstrated to us at Volkswagen during the last half year. Out of 500 letters sent to companies in this country producing items we could use, over half were not even answered. Another 40% were answered, but the firms stated they were not interested. Only 10% seemed to want our business enough to respond...