World Business: Personal File: Aug. 23, 1963

∙ After five years of glaring at their old colonial masters, the hard-pressed Indonesians are showing some willingness to do business with the Dutch. Philips Lamp President Frits Philips, 58, whose giant corporation wrote off Indonesian factories worth $5,300,000 after President Sukarno kicked the Dutch out, is just back from a trip to Indonesia with a new agreement. Philips agreed to train Indonesian technicians in The Netherlands, send experts to study Indonesian production problems. Also in the works for Indonesia: $28 million in Dutch trade credits.

∙ A nation that took its silkworms seriously, Japan was shocked when aggressive Shigeki Tashiro, head of Toyo Rayon Co., stepped up synthetic rayon production and started a Japanese “wash-and-wear” boom. Tashiro now believes that rayon is a has-been, is turning Asia’s largest producer of synthetics into newer fibers. Toyo, which has already built several plants abroad, last week was surveying the site for a new Malaysian nylon textile plant at Kuala Lumpur. “If you don’t always strive toward new goals,” Tashiro says at 73, “you lose vitality. That is disastrous.”

∙ “We have to democratize business,” said Harvard-educated Gaston Azcarraga, 35, as he announced a $1,600,000 sale of stock in Fabricas Auto-Mex, which is 55% owned by his wealthy family and 33% by Chrysler, whose cars and trucks it assembles in Mexico. The sale fulfills government directives to spread ownership and to increase the “local content” of autos assembled in Mexico. Auto-Mex (15,308 vehicles a year) will use the money it takes in to build a $15 million engine plant at Toluca, 40 miles from Mexico City, from which Chryslers 60% made in Mexico will eventually emerge.

∙ Already awarded the Order of the British Empire for his sheep-shearing skill (he set a world record of 456 sheep in nine hours), burly Godfrey Bowen, 41, chief instructor of New Zealand’s Wool Board, returned home with a Soviet labor medal after a 10,000-mile shearing trip through Russia. His report made uneasy listening for wool-centered New Zealand. Bowen was impressed by Russian sheep “as big as donkeys,” predicted that the Soviet Union—whose flock of 150 million sheep is increasing 8% a year—in five years will no longer need to import wool, may begin exporting it.