There IS Life at Union Carbide

After years of puzzling over the possibility, many scientists--most notably those at the National Academy of Sciences--have recently concluded that there may well be life on Mars. The news came as no surprise to executives at the Union Carbide Corp. By synthesizing a Martian atmosphere and successfully growing plants and microbes in it, Carbide's researchers had reached the same conclusion. Why should Union Carbide care? Though the conclusion hardly helps sales, the process of reaching it has yielded the company many down-to-earth benefits. Carbide has, for example, found new ways to stop damage to plant life from smog and air pollution, discovered techniques to ship perishable fruits and vegetables without damage.

In the U.S. chemical industry, where the entry of dozens of oil companies a few years back vastly stepped up competition and cut profits, exotic research has become ordinary out of necessity. Carbide has 29 laboratories, will spend $80 million this year to improve old products and bring out at least 50 new ones. Each year it also spends almost $300 million to build additional plants and facilities that can transform laboratory finds into mass-produced products. Last week Carbide announced that it will build a $30 million plant--its 93rd overseas facility--in Venezuela to make plastics from Venezuelan natural gas, will expand its biggest plastics plant, in Bound Brook, N.J., to produce two kinds of tough new material.

The stress on productive research has helped Carbide recover from a long profit drop, caused largely by the industry's overcapacity. The nation's second largest chemical company (after Du Pont) raised its 1964 earnings 18% to $189 million on record sales of $1.9 billion, was able to increase dividends for the first time in eight years; first-quarter earnings this year rose another 27% to $51.8 million. President Birny Mason, 56, this spring proposed--and stockholders eagerly approved--a 2-for-l split of Carbide stock.

To the Consumer. Organized in 1917 out of the merger of five small companies that made acetylene gas and other carbon products, Carbide long did its biggest business supplying the steel industry with everything from oxygen for furnaces to the vanadium metal added to strengthen stainless steel. Now supplies for steel have been surpassed by chemicals, which represent 25% of Carbide's sales; they range from liquid hydrogen for space fuels to a new compound that dissolves detergents and may eliminate detergent-fouled tap water and help end stream pollution.

Carbide makes more than a thousand varieties of plastic (for women's coats, artificial wigs, handbags and baby bottles), last year acquired the Englander Co., a mattress maker, to spread sales of urethane foam. Its Linde division makes synthetic sapphires for scientific use with laser and maser beams, but has a profitable sideline in women's jewelry. In fact, though Carbide is primarily a supplier to other industries, it now counts about 10% of its sales in direct consumer products. Its longtime line of Eveready batteries includes 450 shapes and sizes, and its Prestone trademark is on 30 automobile products. It has introduced Glad plastic kitchen wrap, sandwich bags, and drinking straws, intends to expand this line. "Union Carbide never really decided to go into the consumer market," says President Mason, "but we have the technology for the consumer, so we're using it."

Modernizing Management. This widening product spread forced Mason, a Cornell-trained ('31) engineer, into doing some research of his own on Carbide's tangled management. Deciding that no consultant could possibly comprehend so diverse a company, Mason two years ago began a huge reorganization from within. Finished last fall, it streamlined Carbide into 13 operating divisions in four groups, with Mason and three executive vice presidents as a committee at the top. The new system seems to work so well that Union Carbide now has an excellent chance--even better than that of finding life on Mars--of maintaining profits in the competitive and constantly changing chemical industry.

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