Merck & Co. Most Admired Firm, Fortune Survey Finds

NEW YORK â€”  Merck & Co., which had soaring profits through the first three quarters of 1986, has been named the most admired corporation in the United States in a survey by Fortune magazine released Tuesday.

International Business Machines, which had been named the most admired corporation every year since the poll was first taken in 1982, finished in seventh place.

Two California-based financial institutions were ranked among the bottom 10 of the 300 companies. BankAmerica was ranked No. 299 and Financial Corp. of America was ranked No. 297.

Merck, a Rahway, N.J.-based pharmaceutical firm, scored 8.38 out of a possible score of 10 in the weekly business magazine’s poll of more than 8,200 senior executives, outside directors and financial analysts.

Three-hundred firms in 33 industry groups were listed in the rankings. The 10 largest companies in an industry, determined by sales or assets, were included in the survey.

The top 10 finishers in the the poll included: No. 2, Liz Claiborne, the apparel manufacturer; No. 3, aerospace giant Boeing Co.; No. 4, J. P. Morgan & Co. Inc., commercial bankers; No. 5, Rubbermaid, maker of rubber and plastic products; No. 6, Shell Oil; No. 8, Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical firm; No. 9, Dow Jones & Co., the financial reporting company and publisher of The Wall Street Journal; and No. 10, Herman Miller, the furniture manufacturer.

Falling out of the top 10 was Exxon, which ranked 13th. Fortune, noting the world’s largest oil company had an improvement in its overall score, attributed the slip to increased competition among the top firms in the poll.

On the negative side, the least admired company of the 300 firms was LTV, the steel company that has filed for protection under federal bankruptcy laws. Ranked 296th was Manville, which is also undergoing reorganization, and another company facing legal problems, Union Carbide, was 293rd. Union Carbide is being sued by victims of the 1984 cyanide gas leak in Bhopal, India.

The other firms in the bottom 10 were: No. 299, BankAmerica; No. 298, American Motors, the auto manufacturer; No. 297, Financial Corp. of America; No. 295, Bethlehem Steel; No. 294, Pan Am Corp., the airline; No. 292, apparel maker Manhattan Industries; and No. 291, Trans World Airlines.

The respondents ranked Merck first overall in long-term investment value and ability to attract, develop and keep talented employees, Fortune said.