Re: Various CL Pickings

Posted by Owen_Dyneto On 2015/10/7 14:19:07

From Packard's 1937 Annual Report to the stockholders:

Factory sales at wholesale prices totaled $94,422,477.77, a substantial increase over 1936 during which sales amounted to $73,052,859.28. Earnings, after all charges, were $3,052,212.05 as compared with $7,053,219.81 for the year 1936. During the last half of the year, the trends of labor costs, rising material prices and the existing depression resulted in reducing our earnings. They were effected, too, by the necessity for bringing out completely new models of our junior lines of cars, and new models also of our senior cars.

A comparison to an earlier time is irresistible; certainly the market was far larger for luxury cars but in the 3 years between 1925 and 1927 Packard averaged about 60,000 cars a year and a net earnings per year of about $13,000,000. Kind of like today, big cars = big profit, small cars = smaller profit. Of course you had to have the market and the product to sell into it. It would be interesting to see a table of Packard's net earning for every year, the data is all there as all the annual reports survive, it would just take someone with the interest to dig the data out.