Other Activities
Corning employs over 26,000 people worldwide and had sales of $6.6 billion in 2010. The company has been listed for many years among Fortune magazine's 500 largest industrial companies, and was ranked #350 in 2011.
Although the company has long been publicly owned, James R. Houghton, great-great-grandson of the founder, served as chairman of the board of directors from 2001 to 2007. Over the years Houghton family ownership has declined to about 2%. Wendell P. Weeks has been with the company since 1983 and as of 2011 was chairman, chief executive officer, and president.
Over its 150-year history Corning invented a process for rapid and inexpensive production of light bulbs (Corning developed the glass for Thomas Edison's light bulb), was an early major manufacturer of glass panels and funnels for television tubes, invented and produced Vycor (high temperature glass with high thermal shock resistance), and invented and produced Corelle (durable glass dinnerware), Pyrex, and Pyroceram (glass-ceramic cookware). Corning manufactured the windows for U.S. manned space vehicles, and supplied the glass blank for the primary mirror in the Hubble Space Telescope. Corning won the National Medal of Technology four times for its product and process innovations.
In July 2008 Corning announced the sale of Steuben Glass Works to Steuben Glass LLC, an affiliate of the private equity firm Schottenstein Stores Corporation. Steuben Glass had been unprofitable for more than a decade, losing 30 million dollars over the previous five years.
Read more about this topic: Corning Inc.
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreative body in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)