File:Bell telephone magazine (1922) (14568493300).jpg

Identifier: belltelephonemag00vol2930amerrich (find matches)
Title: Bell telephone magazine
Year: 1922 (1920s)
Authors: American Telephone and Telegraph Company American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Information Dept
Subjects: Telephone
Publisher: (New York, American Telephone and Telegraph Co., etc.)
Contributing Library: Prelinger Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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the country.Adequate rates bring good earnings,good earnings improvecredit and attract capi-tal, capital builds facili-ties to provide neededservice. Adequate ratespermit us to attract andhold competent people. It is clear, too, thatby any standard youcan find, the Bell Sys-tem rate program isreasonable. For instance, BellSystem intra-state rateshave increased, on theaverage, only 24 percent since 1940. If weinclude all the rate re-quests that are now un-der consideration, theaverage increase wouldstill come to only about40 per cent. The official cost-of-living index * is now Index, Other standards of comparisonalso help to show how reasonable thetelephone rate program is. For in-stance, because telephone wage rateshave more than doubled in the lastten years, the operating expenses ofthe Bell Telephone Companies arehigher by about $900,000,000 a year.This amount alone is nearly twice asmuch as all the increases that havebeen made in telephone rates. Bell System Debt Ratio $ BILLIONS9
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12-3145 *Consumers PriceU. S. Dept. of Labor. The ratio of debt in the Bell Systems capital structure, which was less than a third at the end of the war, is now nearly half i6o Bell Telephone Magazine AUTUMN Look at it from another angle:this time the angle of earnings. In1940 the 30 large industrial com-panies included in the Dow-JonesMarket Average earned an averageof 9.7 per cent on their capital. TheBell System in the same year earned7 per cent. Ten years later, in 1950,these 30 companies averaged 14.4per cent earnings and the Bell Sys-tem only 6 per cent. Please bear inmind that those 6 per cent earningsare the earnings of the enterprisewhich needs more capital from in-vestors than any other company, andwhich must compete for investorsdollars with other well-managed com-

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