"Only the Best"

Although it runs only sixth among the nation's television makers, New York's Magnavox Co. outdistances most of the field in spectacular sales growth. With the exception of 1963, it has broken its own records for the past eight years.

Last week Magnavox President Frank Freimann announced that 1966 sales had jumped 36%, to $453 million, earnings had soared more than 50%, to $34.7 million, or $2.25 a share. More over, the company clocked an estimated 30% return on invested capital, against 12% for U.S. industry as a whole.

Magnavox, which aims for the top of the color-TV market, sells sets that range from a high of $750 to a low of $398.50. Cabinets come in a decorator's assortment of styles, including Mediterranean, French Provincial, Early American and Contemporary. The sets utilize a "background coating" technique that successfully mutes harsh primary colors.

The company also turns out black-and-white TV, FM/AM radios, stereo consoles, portable phonographs, and a TV-radio-phono combination called Color Stereo Theater. For industry, the firm produces computerized-data storage units, and the new Xerox-marketed Magnafax--a copying machine that transmits and receives facsimiles of documents, memos and letters via standard telephones. Magnavox backlog--virtually all of it in military orders for walkie-talkies, radar units, aircraft and mobile ground communications equipment, satellite signal receivers, and submarine-detecting "Sonobuoys"--stands at $152 million. As if all that were not enough, Magnavox has entered the wooden-furniture business, and it is entering the organ field with an electronic instrument used by Leopold Stokowski's American Symphony Orchestra.

The source of much of the company's energy is its 60-year-old president. Freimann (pronounced Fry-man), who heads up a trim management team with an average age in the low 40s, emigrated from Hungary as a boy, lived in Chicago, quit trade school after two years and, at 19, talked his way into the chief engineer's job at the Lyradion Co., one of the early makers of radio-phonographs. "In those days," says Freimann, "the only people who knew anything about radio were kids." Freimann eventually formed his own Electro-Acoustic Products Co., where his chief supplier of loudspeakers was a struggling outfit named Magnavox. After the two companies merged in 1938, Freimann persuaded the loss-troubled Magnavox management to switch from component to consumer production, stick to a quality line, sell at fixed prices through carefully selected franchised dealers. Even today, Magnavox has only 3,500 dealers.

"We don't want to be the biggest," explains Freimann, who became president in 1950. "Only the best."

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