Foreign content of U. S. corporate activities

Abstract

THE SUBJECT of this article has been treated in various ways in previous issues of this Journal. In the January-February 1965 issue Walter P. Stern reviewed the magnitude of "U. S. Direct Investments Abroad," and detailed the foreign sales, earnings, and assets of 37 U. S. companies for the years 196162-63. In the September-October 1965 issue E. Bruce Fredrikson dealt with the problems of security analysis and the multinational corporation. The objectives in this article are to extend and build on the excellent work found in these previous studies. In doing so, the authors have used the 1964 operations of the 500 largest industrial corporations in the United States as a sample.' These corporations have a larger relative share in foreign business activities than smaller companies of a less specialized nature.2 In addition to establishing the over-all importance of foreign operations to major United States business firms and to the United States economy, the current article points to the increasing importance of this subject to the security analyst.