World Business: Personal File: Jun. 1, 1962

Can a German family dynasty marketing Europe’s best-known soap powder hold its own against the U.S. giants moving in on the Common Market? Konrad Henkel, 47, head of the Henkel Group that produces Persil, believes the answer is yes, though there may yet be a little soap-opera suspense. Henkel (1961 sales: more than $250 million) has lately seen more than 10% of the German detergent market grabbed off by Colgate and Procter & Gamble, who have been spending twice as much on advertising as Germans normally do. Konrad Henkel, who shares control of his company with eleven relatives, believes he can offset U.S. advertising with German science, is steadily automating his plants, and has his chemists working with textile makers to develop fibers that will get cleaner quicker with Henkel detergents.

But he fears that in the battle of the giants, Germany’s smaller detergent producers will be driven to the wall.

When trim John G. Paimer, 50, chairman of Australia’s Ready Mixed Concrete, Ltd., decided to issue 750,000 new shares of stock in his company’s British subsidiary, he and his colleagues were a bit worried by the shaky state of the London stock market. To their astonishment, British investors rushed in to oversubscribe the issue 60 times, thereby forcing a drawing to see who would actually get the coveted shares. The reason for all the enthusiasm: since Palmer, a New Zealand-born corporation lawyer, joined Ready Mixed as a director in 1945, the company has expanded into eight foreign countries, now controls 186 concrete plants, 40 quarries and a Malayan tin mine. Last year Ready Mixed doubled its profit to $2,400,000. Placid Chairman Palmer, who meticulously limits himself to an eight-hour workday and refuses to take papers home, intends to maintain the same headlong expansion into any area “where labor is costly.”

With their sales off 30% because of U.S. restrictions on textile imports, Hong Kong’s textile makers are asking the government of the colony to impose production controls on their industry. But M.I.T.-educated P. Y. (for Ping Yuan) Tang, 63, Hong Kong’s biggest textile magnate, has other plans as well. He intends to add synthetics to his cotton cloth output, has expanded his zipper production, and is considering going into electronics. Says Tang: “Diversification is the long-term solution for Hong Kong.” To give the island colony time to diversify, however, Tang argues that the U.S. must relax its quotas on Hong Kong Textiles.

“Hong Kong,” he says, “is the West Berlin of the Far East.

If the U.S. really wants to help Hong Kong solve the refugee problem, it must consider the colony a hardship case.”