Word: ponts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...deep financial trouble. Copeland holds a lien on Lammot Jr.'s real property, including a $500,000 home, making it unavailable to other creditors. Copeland's financial worries have been further complicated by the near failure of a family-connected stock brokerage, Francis I. du Pont & Co. Various family members and their friends are investors in the firm, and its troubles cost them at least $6 million (see following story...
Expensive Failures. Besides his family problems, Copeland faced a good deal of corporate discouragement. Under his leadership, Du Pont suffered a serious erosion of its pre-eminence in chemicals, even though the company is still the biggest in the field (1970 sales: $3.6 billion). Du Pont leaders have long dreamed of producing "another nylon," but the company has introduced few notably profitable products in the past decade. Several that did appear turned out to be expensive failures. Corfam, the synthetic leather, is being phased out after an investment of $100 million. Other disappointments: an antiflu pill called Symmetrel...
Because Du Pont supplies products to such a wide range of U.S. industries, the company stands to do better as the economy speeds up. Its refusal to be rushed and its sense of dynastic dignity, however, have allowed brasher competitors to narrow its lead in chemicals. McCoy is the first chief executive in the company's 169-year history to have no direct family ties with the Du Ponts, but he reflects their courtly attitude toward business. "We do not believe in doing things on a crash basis," he says. "We evolve continuously and deliberately." Yet as a board...
...small and often clubby group of men who run the nation's financial center are acquiring an unlikely new member this week. H. Ross Perot, the 40-year-old computer multimillionaire from Dallas, will formally take control of F.I. du Pont, Glore Forgan & Co., the nation's third largest brokerage firm. No one on Wall Street seems quite certain how to welcome a Nice Guy from Texas. A banker sent Perot a cowboy suit, and an F.I. du Pont salesman ordered a pair of tasseled loafers for his new proprietor. Perot showed up in Manhattan wearing his usual...
...that matter, are Ross Perot and his Texas-size bank account. Last summer the Du Pont firm, hard up for capital as a result of Wall Street's bear market, agreed to merge with Glore Forgan Staats, thus picking up some $18 million in new money. Even that infusion was not enough, and to raise cash last November F.I. du Pont tried to sell 100,000 shares that it owned in Perot's computer-servicing company, Electronic Data Systems Corp. It had acquired the shares in a contract with E.D.S. for computer services. The deal called for Perot...