SHIPPING: New Fleet for Grace

• Share

From the time when it bought its first ships in 1893, Grace Line Inc. (Canada to South America) has spent $118 million on ship construction. Last week, with a few scratchings of a pen, Grace Line President Lewis A. Lapham committed the line to a shipbuilding program that will cost more than double that amount. Lapham signed a contract with the Federal Maritime Board under which Grace promised to build, and the board agreed to subsidize, 26 ships at a cost of $286 million. The program will completely replace Grace's present aging fleet over a 20-year period, as part of the Maritime Board's plan to modernize U.S. merchant shipping before it all becomes obsolete at once (TIME, Oct. 11, 1954).

Grace has already awarded construction contracts on two of the ships to Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. The two will be 19,238-ton, 308-passenger, air-conditioned liners to replace Grace's Sartta Rosa and Santa Paula. Cost: $22,540,000 apiece, of which the Maritime Board will put up $9,485,000, the difference between U.S. and foreign construction costs.

While the Grace Line was thus getting up steam, other ventures in the W. R. Grace & Co. empire were growing just as busily. The company announced last week that it would authorize $100 million in capital spending for 1956, $40 million of it for Grace's booming chemical ventures (among them: Grace Chemical Co., Dewey & Almy Chemical Co. Division), which in 1955 accounted for 45% of Grace's total income v. only 3% in 1952. Another $30 million will go to the Grace Line, the remainder principally to paper enterprises in South America, where Grace also has ventures in sugar, paint, textiles, light bulbs and rum bottling.

Grace can well afford the expansion. Both South American and U.S. subsidiaries are chalking up record earnings; the Grace National Bank of New York, for example, finished 1955 with net earnings of $986,083, up 27% from 1954. Estimated earnings of W. R. Grace as a whole in 1955: more than $17 million, roughly a 16% increase over the previous year.