ALUMINUM: Kaiser Buys

In 1946, shrewd old Henry Kaiser expanded his sprawling industrial empire by leasing three huge Government aluminum processing plants. Last week, for $36 million, Kaiser’s Permanente Metals Corp. took title to the plants which had cost $90 million to build. The new properties: 1) a bauxite-processing plant in Baton Rouge with an annual capacity of 500,000,000 lbs. of alumina; 2) the Mead Aluminum Reduction Plant at Mead, Wash., which refines the Baton Rouge alumina, has an annual capacity of 216,000,000 lbs. of aluminum ingots; 3) the Trentwood Rolling Mill, at Trentwood, Wash., which fabricates Mead’s ingots, has an annual capacity of 288,000,000 lbs. of rolled products.

The deal gave Kaiser a permanent place in the U.S. aluminum industry with a totally integrated operation from mine to mill. It also assured Permanente of its ranking as the nation’s third largest aluminum producer, with a primary capacity of 130,000 tons v. Reynolds Metals Co.’s 190,000 tons and the Aluminum Co. of America’s 275,000 tons.

Not even Alcoa, which built all three mills at Government order, could have minded Kaiser’s getting them. With Permanente and Reynolds now controlling about 50% of U.S. aluminum capacity, there was considerably less force behind the Government’s long-standing monopoly charges against Alcoa.