Word: profitability
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...beyond politics. Mining isn't a particularly popular industry, given the propensity to insult the planet in order to get at ores. And this is not a particularly good time to be in the mining business, what with the price of commodities bouncing off all-time lows. Freeport's profits have gone down the shaft, with earnings off 33% in its last quarter, to $129 million. Perhaps that's one reason why Moffett and other senior executives skipped the company's annual meeting last month. Certainly he's used to confrontation, having had to deal with vociferous environmental and social...
...HIDDEN PROFIT Just because a mutual fund bears the name of a firm doesn't mean that firm is managing your money. In fact, a growing number of investors, whether they realize it or not, are pouring cash into subadvised funds. These funds are farmed out by the likes of Vanguard and Dreyfus to outside managers with special expertise. That's a good thing, according to a recent study, which showed that subadvised funds, especially in growth, health and emerging-market stocks, initially outperform, by up to 0.5% annually, their in-house peers. Two such choices are Enterprise Growth...
...creative collection of industry renegades held in check by Eaton--was spectacularly unsuited for this European model of management. Eaton shaped a team of hotshots led by product wizards Bob Lutz and Francois Castaing. In addition to inventing the minivan and sport-utility vehicle, categories that are such profit machines today, Chrysler's designers proved with models like the Viper and the Prowler that cars don't have to be boring...
Just what that something was may be hard to pinpoint. Of the six launch fiascoes, three involved new, profit-driven rockets: the bulked-up Delta 3, with twice the lift-off muscle of its Delta 2 ancestor; and the Athena 2, a smaller rocket with less propulsive oomph but a bargain price tag. The most recent Titan flub appears to involve misfirings of the rocket's upper stage, a $1.23 billion mistake that may have been caused by badly loaded software. Other miscues have included everything from an electrical short, which caused another Titan to explode, to faulty guidance, which...
Warren Buffett, the investor and head of Berkshire Hathaway, noted some of these trends two years ago, when his Geico insurance subsidiary doubled its projected 4% profit margin because the number of claims was decreasing. Last year margins were well over the target again. Buffett warned that such stellar results would not persist because they would soon invite competition. That's what has happened, and now he expects the industry's margins to contract as insurers cut prices to battle for market share--bad news if you own the stocks but not if you're a policyholder...