Corporations: Where Rubber Reigns

• Share

For 37 years the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. has tenaciously held its place as the world's largest rubber company. Since there is no company on the scene that seems likely to overtake it soon, Goodyear has looked for its challenges elsewhere. With 98,000 employees—one of the largest work forces in the nation—it now turns out more than 30,000 products, from myriad rubber goods to such unexpected items as airplane brakes, radar systems, missile liners and plastic film used to package anything from oleomargarine to cigars. As if this were not enough, the Pentagon this week will take the wraps off an unusual, top-secret new missile developed by Goodyear (though rubber plays only a small part in it) under a $200 million contract. Called SUBROC, the missile is launched from the torpedo tube of a submerged submarine, shoots out of the water into the air, seeks out an enemy sub miles away and dives in for the kill.

Despite its wide and often imaginative diversification, Goodyear still rolls along on rubber tires, making 2,500 different sizes and styles that account for two-thirds of its business. Last month the company produced its billionth tire, and Goodyear men boast that every carmaker in the Western world uses some of their tires as original equipment. In the U.S. this year, Goodyear will sell a third of the 41 million tires for new cars and a fourth of the 80 million replacement tires. It blankets the country with 73,000 sales outlets and, despite a drop of nearly 15% in tire prices because of discount competition, has held profits over the past five years to a steady 4.5% of sales. The achievement was largely the result of automation all along the line. Goodyear's total sales, already up 7.3% for the first nine months this year, seem certain to bound to an alltime record of $1.7 billion before 1963 ends.

Protégé Behind Him. This bouncy giant was founded in 1898 by Akron Brothers Charles and Frank Seiberling, who named the company after Charles Goodyear, discoverer of the vulcanizing process. The Seiberlings had the good fortune to hire a young engineering genius named Paul Weeks Litchfield, who came up with a more easily detachable auto tire than any on the market and by 1916 had built the company into the largest tiremaker. Litchfield took full control of the company in 1921, when Wall Street bankers pushed out the Seiberlings on the ground that they had dangerously overextended the company. (The Seiberlings then started another company under their own name, which now ranks twelfth). Litchfield stayed with Goodyear until his death in 1959, but left behind a protege to run the company.