Business: Competition Goes Global

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Out of all this came a steady increase m U.S. investment around the globe (see map). Singer Manufacturing, the sewing machine maker that rings up 57% of its $640 million annual sales abroad, last year opened new plants in Nigeria and Ceylon. American Machine & Foundry introduced automated bowling alleys to Japan, and in Buenos Aires Rockefeller-backed supermarkets began to undersell corner grocers by 25% or more.

But since the Common Market came into being in 1957, the tide of U.S. business activity abroad has been steadily shifting toward Europe, and in 1962 U.S. investment in the Common Market rose to a new yearly record of $881 million. In October alone, U.S. firms made 21 major advances into the European market, ranging from Du Pont's acquisition of a German film manufacturer to U.S. Steel's fifty-fifty partnership with Italy's government-owned Finsider complex in a new fabricating plant. Among the burgeoning American enclaves in Europe was the town of Genk, Belgium, where a subsidiary of Allegheny Ludlum broke ground for a rolling mill just across a canal from the site of a new $73 million Ford plant. In all, U.S.-owned plants in Western Europe in 1962 produced some $12 billion worth of goods, three times the value of U.S. exports of manufactured goods to Europe, and more than the combined gross national products of Austria and Finland.

Headroom for Big Charlie. Partly because so many U.S. companies have already established their European beachheads, U.S. investment in the Common Market entered a new phase in 1962: U.S. firms are shifting from wholly owned European branches to convenient marriages of capital and knowledge with European companies. American Motors, whose foreign sales have risen from 16,000 cars in 1960 to 53,000 in 1962, closed a deal under which France's Renault will assemble its Ramblers, and won an order from Charles de Gaulle for a bulletproof sedan. (Big Charles presumably likes the Rambler's headroom.) In another international alliance. Republic Aviation joined forces with planemakers from four Common Market countries and Britain to design a jet fighter for NATO. U.S. business operations abroad are getting to be like those new international movie productions whose stars come from all over and speak in many accents.

The tide does not run just one way. France's Saint-Gobain, the world's biggest manufacturer of glass, opened a highly automated $40 million plant near Kingsport, Tenn., in 1962, and Paris-based Pechiney. Europe's biggest aluminum maker, bought control of New York's Howe Sound Co. A resourceful lady from Tokyo turned a tidy profit in New York's financial district with a restaurant catering to the lunchtime tastes of the 1,000 Japanese brokers and businessmen now operating in downtown Manhattan.

Sprouting from Brussels. The new Europe, though disturbed by its own slowdown, is the Western world's fastest growing economy. The Common Market Six led the world in international trade in 1962, were second only to the U.S. in automobile production (4,700,000 cars), and were rapidly gaining on the U.S. and Russia in steel production (about 79 million tons). In its fifth year, the Common Market forced itself on international consciousness as the world's third great economic power.