Enlightened Businesses[1] – Part 1, Lincoln Electric
The story of how an American manufacturing business became the global leader of its industry by keeping manufacturing jobs in America and offering its workers guaranteed employment and high pay.
**Please note that this post is not investment advice. Please see the full disclosure on the About page**
Profit and Purpose
In his famous magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote: “By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”[2]. Nevertheless, in his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith also wrote, “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”[3]
Smith was not the only person to have grappled with the tension between economic principles and human nature. While the free market and the pursuit of self-interest can be hugely efficient at improving material abundance, most of us would find something deeply amiss if success is only measured in monetary terms. As I argued in my last post, one of the reasons for humanity’s extraordinary progress over the past two centuries is that we, as a society, have made ethical decisions[4] to use the material abundance from capitalism to pursue a wide range of goals that we deemed desirable for a good life.
The tension between the pursuit of self-interest and the common good is not easily resolved. Followers of the “Invisible Hand” might argue that the former automatically leads to the latter, but there is clearly plenty of contradictory evidence - the current Opioid Crisis in the US being an illustrative example. However, it would be equally wrong to throw out the profit motive. Profit ensures companies’ long-term survival and enables them to fund research and development and provide stable, well-paid jobs. There is also a moral obligation to profit. While we might think that shareholder capitalism only benefits Wall Street bankers and the global 1%, many of us are also shareholders through our pension plans and savings accounts. Charities, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds are also shareholders. We entrust our money to companies with an expectation of a reasonable return so that we might fulfil our personal objectives, be that a secure retirement or the ability to fund charitable activities. It’s vital in a prosperous and inclusive economy that management teams fulfil their moral obligation to shareholders.
For business leaders intending on doing good, it’s important that their social or environmental goals complement, rather than conflict with, shareholders’ long-term interests. This is a tricky balance. Over the next few posts, I will look at the history of several companies that have tried to do well by doing good. I will start with Lincoln Electric, an American company that’s the global leader in electric arc welding. I found the company fascinating, partly because it has stood the test of time. Over the past few decades, as American manufacturing businesses outsourced their production to cheaper overseas locations, Lincoln Electric has prospered by keeping manufacturing in America. The company achieved this through a corporate culture emphasising trust and cooperation between workers and management.
Lincoln Electric
John Lincoln was born in Painesville, Ohio, in 1866. His father was an abolitionist minister, and his mother was a physician. In high school, Lincoln became fascinated with the new and evolving field of electricity. In 1885, he enrolled at Ohio State University to study engineering, but inpatient to get practical experience, he left the university before obtaining a degree to work for Brush Electric Company[5]. At the time, Brush Electric Company dominated the market of arc lighting. Its Cleveland factory produced 1,500 lamps per month, and the company had 80,000 lamps in service across American cities[6]. However, Lincoln’s time at Brush Electric was short-lived. In 1893, he was fired from the company. His next job, designing electric motors for Emmett Elliott and his two brothers, lasted less than two years. In 1895, as America was in the midst of an economic depression, John Lincoln was jobless and living in a spare room with his wife and children[7].
Lincoln’s lucky break came when Herbert Henry Dow, who would soon start the Dow Chemical Company, asked him to redesign a motor for his cement mill. Using the $250 fee from this job, worth just over $9,000 today, Lincoln founded his own company, Lincoln Electric, in 1895[8]. The company initially focused on electric motors, which were sold to machine shops, elevator companies, and other manufacturing businesses. It even produced an electric car, capable of doing 16 miles per hour[9], but Lincoln was a century ahead of his time. It’s unclear when and how Lincoln Electric became involved in arc welding - the inspiration might have come from requests by local steel companies - but by the 1910s, Lincoln Electric was offering compelling electric arc welders[10]. At that time, riveting was still the preferred approach for joining pieces of metal together[11], but over the ensuing years and decades, Lincoln would convince many to switch to arc welding.
Around the same time, John Lincoln realised that his passion was for inventing new technologies rather than managing a company. A management consultant hired by the company in 1910 found “several conditions which are not only incorrect from a business standpoint, but which would cause you considerable trouble and loss of money as the business continues.”[12] In 1907, John Lincoln convinced his younger brother, James Lincoln, to join the company. Over the next few years, John handed over more and more of the managerial duties to James, and in 1914, James Lincoln became the company’s General Manager[13]. Under his leadership, Lincoln Electric became the leading company in electric arc welding globally and developed a unique, high-performance culture.
To illustrate the remarkable achievements of Lincoln Electric’s culture, consider the following:
Since 1914, the company has held an Advisory Board meeting every two weeks, where worker representatives meet with top management to discuss suggestions and criticism[14]. From those meetings came progressive workplace policies, many of them implemented decades before they became the norm, such as group life insurance (1915), paid vacations (1923), employee stock ownership (1925), annual cash bonuses (1934), annuities for retired employees (1936), and guaranteed employment (1958)[15]. Those meetings were not focused solely on employee benefits but also on how workers can help the company. One example was when Lincoln Electric’s American workers agreed to create jobs abroad, reasoning that foreign expansion was necessary for the company to remain competitive over the long term[16]. In another instance, American workers agreed to skip vacations to boost the company’s production, so that higher domestic profits could offset losses from Europe[17].
Despite operating in a capital-intensive, cyclical industry for at least eighty years, Lincoln Electric didn’t lay off a single worker in its Cleveland factories for economic reasons[18]. Reference to Lincoln Electric’s Guaranteed Continuous Employment Plan can still be found in its annual report[19]. Cleveland-based employees are guaranteed a minimum of 30 hours of work per week. In exchange, there is mandatory overtime during periods of high demand. However, as production workers are paid by piecework and receive a share of the annual profit, they are very well compensated during those periods.
While Lincoln Electric is non-unionised, its factory workers are some of the best-paid in the American manufacturing industry. Every year since 1934, Lincoln Electric has set aside around a third of its annual profit for employee bonuses. Year-end bonuses have ranged from 25% to 120% of the base pay, and since 1955, it has averaged 77%[20]. Even in the depth of the Financial Crisis in 2008, year-end bonuses represented 61% of employees’ base pay, and the average worker made $70,000 that year, roughly twice the national average[21].
It’s not just employees who have benefited, shareholders profited, too. Lincoln Electric’s factories were much more efficient than its competitors[22]: it had a workers-to-supervisor ratio of 100-to-1, compared to 25-to-1, which was typical in manufacturing[23], and its voluntary staff turnover rate was one-fifth of the industry average[24]. More than a century after the Lincoln brothers sold their first electric arc welding machine, Lincoln Electric remains the leading arc welding company in the world. Since the company was listed on the NASDAQ in 1995, its total shareholder return has compounded at 14% per annum, meaning $1,000 invested in 1995 would be worth $40,000 today with dividends reinvested. Over the past decade, its return on equity has averaged just under 31%[25].
Lincoln Electric has often been grouped with “welfare capitalists” such as Eastman Kodak, Sears Roebuck, Procter and Gamble, John Lewis, and Lever Bros.[26]. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, those companies voluntarily decided to raise workers’ pay and improve their working and living conditions. The Lever brothers famously built Port Sunlight, a modern company town with subsidised housing, parks, schools, libraries, and community centres[27]. While most welfare capitalists pursued their initiatives out of a sense of paternalism and moral duty, that was, at most, only part of Lincoln’s consideration. In fact, Lincoln strongly opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and went as far as saying, “Our present policy of government-promised security is producing a race of incompetent softies.”[28]
Lincoln was a true believer in capitalism and saw the noble goal of business as pushing humanity forward. For Lincoln, business success meant making “a better and better product to be sold to more and more people at a lower and lower price”[29], and this can only be achieved by having motivated workers. He once told a reporter, “I knew that if I could get the people of the company to want the company to succeed as badly as I did, there would be no problems we could not solve together.”[30]
Lincoln believed that companies had to earn the right to expect hard work from their employees[31]. In his views, workers were not machines or automatons but creative beings that deserved respect and recognition[32]. This view was a consequence of his Christian upbringing[33]. His writings on business and economics were full of Biblical references. To this day, the Golden Rule - Treating Others As You Would Like To Be Treated - is still listed as the company’s Guiding Principle in its annual report[34]. Initiatives such as the Advisory Board were a direct outcome of Lincoln’s awareness of the importance of respect and recognition.
Lincoln believed management responsibility was not merely about being kind to workers[35]. Human progress is built on top of productive industries, and it’s the responsibility of management to improve efficiency at their firms. Lincoln treated his workers with respect, but he also expected hard work from them. Interviews with Lincoln Electric’s workers suggested that the pace of work was intense[36]. To enable guaranteed employment, staffing levels were set so that the average work week was around forty-five to forty-six hours during normal times, and fifty hours per week was common during busy year-end periods[37]. There was little tolerance for poor performance, and employees who persistently scored less than 80 out of 100 in their annual evaluation were dismissed[38].
Workers who met the high-performance standard were generously rewarded. Piecework compensation had a bad reputation, but Lincoln believed it effectively reinforced the relationship between productivity and money earned[39]. It also encouraged “game spirit”[40], enabling those who excelled at their job to take home more money. Piecework’s bad reputation came from management’s temptation to reset the piece rate whenever workers began to earn serious money[41]. At Lincoln Electric, there was great reluctance to tinker with the piece rates[42], and workers were given the right to challenge every new piece rate that they felt was unfairly low[43]. Typically, piece rates were set so that productive workers could earn competitive compensation with their base pay, and the year-end bonus provided a significant upside. In good years, those bonuses doubled production workers’ take-home pay[44]. The bonus level was influenced by firm-wide profitability and workers’ merit-based evaluation, which considered the quality of their work and how well they cooperated with colleagues.
The final reward for Lincoln Electric’s workers (for those based in Cleveland) is guaranteed employment. While the policy was formalised in 1958, it was implicitly practised since the company’s early years[45]. Lincoln believed that workers would never be fully committed if the threat of job loss during a recession was not eliminated. Lincoln wrote in his book, A New Approach to Industrial Economics, “If we will follow the philosophy of Christ as given in the Sermon on the Mount, we shall have the proper answer to the problem of lay-offs. When we treat the worker as we would like to be treated, the answer is plain. Continuous employment is needed to secure the cooperation of the worker. It is also basically sound.”[46]. In addition, given the cost of finding and training employees, it was in any long-term oriented company’s self-interest to avoid laying off workers[47].
Lincoln Electric’s culture greatly contributed to the company’s success, but other factors also played a role. When James Lincoln took over the company’s management, he abandoned his brother’s practice of building custom motors and focused on just two main product lines. In his view, the proliferation of products increased overhead and reduced efficiency[48]. Lincoln wrote, “As any organization becomes more complicated, its efficiency obviously is reduced. No manager can be as expert in two things as he can be in one. Success of any organization depends on its relative efficiency compared to competing organizations. As size and complications increase, efficiency tends to decrease.” He went on, “The future of any company depends on its success in serving the customer…. His chance for success depends on his doing a few things well, rather than many things not so well.”[49].
Another contributor to Lincoln Electric’s success was the introduction of coated electrodes in the 1930s, which drastically increased customers’ productivity[50]. By 1941, the company had half of the arc welding market in America[51]. During World War II, Lincoln Electric’s high profits and bonuses attracted the attention of the US government, which charged the company with profiteering on government contracts and using bonuses to avoid tax[52]. Ironically, the Federal Trade Commission simultaneously charged Lincoln Electric for pricing its products too low with the intention of driving competitors out of business[53]. James Lincoln fiercely defended his company, arguing that the low price and high profits resulted from the company’s superior efficiency. He was vindicated when a US Navy investigation found that when measured on output per dollar of capital equipment, Lincoln Electric was nearly twice as efficient as the nearest competitor, Westinghouse[54].
Lincoln’s insistence on keeping the company simple with a few product lines had its drawbacks, too. There were missed opportunities, such as gas-shielded arc welding[55], but potentially more costly was the impact on talent retention. This was made worse by the fact that like many “enlightened capitalists”, Lincoln retained absolute control over the business and had no intention of stepping aside. Opportunities for advancement were limited, which frustrated talented and ambitious individuals. Some of them left for other companies. A group of Lincoln management joined Emerson Electric, turning it from a small business into a large corporation[56]. For Lincoln, he worked all the way until the end. He died in June 1965, and only then was the baton passed onto his successor, William Irrgang[57].
Irrgang was a loyal follower of Lincoln’s philosophy. He shared the same fiscal conservatism and commitment to Lincoln’s Incentive Management[58]. Under Irrgang’s two-decade leadership, Lincoln Electric continued to flourish. In the 1970s, Lincoln Electric maintained a 40% share of the welding industry and managed to drive Generic Electric out of the market and reduce Westinghouse to a niche player[59]. In 1975, the annual bonus reached an average of 109% of the regular compensation[60]. However, by the end of the 1970s, welding became a mature industry in America[61]. Lincoln Electric had limited exposure to international markets. Its subsidiaries in Australia, Canada, and France contributed only 10% of the company’s sales[62], and like Lincoln, Irrgang had no real ambition for aggressive international expansion.
The company encountered its first serious test under new leadership in the early 1980s. An unusually long and sharp recession saw demand for welding evaporating. Between 1981 and 1983, Lincoln Electric’s net income fell by 42%[63]. While other companies laid off workers, Irrgang kept Lincoln Electric’s commitment to guaranteed employment. Production hours were reduced, but no one was laid off. The average factory worker compensation dropped from $44,000 in 1981 to $27,200 in 1983, but that was still 50% higher than the national average[64].
At the end of 1981, Lincoln Electric’s management created a voluntary programme where production and clerical workers could retrain to become salespeople. Altogether, 68 newly trained salespeople were sent across the country to sell a new line of inexpensive welders to auto shops and small welding outfits[65]. They received a small reimbursement for fuel but had to pay for their own lodging and meals[66]. Nevertheless, they brought in $10 million in sales. When the economy picked up again in 1985, those salespeople returned to their original roles with new knowledge of the company’s customers and the selling process[67].
In 1986, Irrgang stepped down, and George Willis took over as Lincoln Electric’s CEO. He was committed to Lincoln’s values, but having witnessed the impact of the earlier recession and slowing sales growth in America, Willis had the ambition to make Lincoln Electric a global business[68]. Over the next six years, he went on an acquisition spree, buying companies in Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Venezuela, and Europe[69]. At the time, Lincoln Electric’s executive team lacked international experience and thought they could easily replicate their domestic culture, including Incentive Management, abroad[70]. They expected acquired firms to set up Advisory Boards, promote from within, and institute piecework and bonus systems[71].
Right from the start, things went wrong. Lincoln Electric’s net profit halved from 1989 to 1990, and its return on equity dropped from 12% to 5%[72]. By 1992, losses in international operations pushed the whole company into the red[73]. In 1992, Donald Hastings, who by then had spent four decades at Lincoln Electric, replaced Willis as the CEO. Immediately, he went about fixing the company’s international operations. Hastings hired seasoned executives with international experience, including Anthony Massaro, who would later succeed Hastings as the CEO. He also arranged a $230 million loan facility to shore up the balance sheet[74].
In 1993, Hastings relocated to Europe, where Lincoln Electric’s problem was the gravest. It was immediately clear to Hastings that the European operation had to be downsized. The European welding market was severely oversupplied[75], and the companies Lincoln Electric acquired were competing against each other[76]. Germany’s reunification and the Persian Gulf War also sent Europe into a deep recession. Furthermore, Many European countries had welfare-oriented culture, so workers were not used to working as hard as in America. While the average Lincoln Electric production worker in the US worked 43 to 58 hours per week, in Germany, it was only 35 hours[77]. When Hastings visited Lincoln Electric’s European operation, he found factories operating at less than 50% capacity utilisation and workers sleeping on the job. Local business leaders submitted overly optimistic forecasts to inflate their budgets, making business plans unreliable. By April 1993, Lincoln Electric’s European operation was losing more than $8 million per month[78].
Throughout 1993 and 1994, Lincoln downsized and closed many of its international factories. It also increased exports from its more productive US factories[79]. By 1994, the company returned to a net profit of $48 million on sales of $907 million[80]. Throughout this period, Lincoln Electric’s US operation was robust and profitable. This created a dilemma. Does the company continue to pay year-end bonuses to its US workers even though the overall business was losing money? The answer was yes. In 1992, Lincoln Electric paid $52 million in bonuses to its US workers and, in 1993, $55 million. Both times, the bonuses were paid out of borrowed money[81].
Hasting knew Lincoln Electric’s Incentive Management only worked because workers trusted the management team to do the right things. The company’s difficulties were caused by management’s strategic errors, while workers continued to work hard as before. Therefore, it would be unfair to punish the workers. Workers reciprocated this gesture by going the extra mile. Hastings’ turnaround plan called upon the company’s US colleagues to increase production so that higher sales and profits in the US could offset the losses in Europe. The plan required US factories to operate beyond 100% capacity utilisation, increase daily sales targets from $1.8 million to $2.1 million, and increase overall pre-tax profit from $39 million to $52 million[82]. By the end of 1993, daily sales in the US reached $3.1 million, 50% above target. 450 people in key bottleneck areas gave up 614 weeks of vacations, with some people working seven-day weeks for months on end[83].
By 1997, Lincoln Electric was again on a strong foundation. Hastings passed on the leadership to Anthony Massaro. The new CEO organised the company into five regional hubs. While he encouraged each region to align themselves to Lincoln Electric’s US culture, he also gave each region leader a high degree of autonomy so they could adapt to local culture and customer demand[84]. Having learnt the lessons from earlier international expansion, Lincoln continued to cautiously expand abroad. In 1998, it acquired three companies in Canada, Germany, and Turkey. Support for internal research and development was also increased[85].
While Lincoln Electric survived its disastrous international expansion in the early 1990s, it did come at a cost. In 1995, as the company celebrated its centenary year, it became listed on the NASDAQ[86]. The company raised $81 million by selling 12% of its equity to the public to repay the debt accumulated from earlier years[87]. The IPO brought with it the short-term pressure of the stock market, with its demand for quarterly reporting and earnings guidance[88]. In the 1980s, 50% of Lincoln Electric’s shares were held by the Lincoln family, 40% by employees, and 10% by external shareholders[89]. After the IPO, more and more of the company’s shares would end up in the hands of external shareholders. Today, Lincoln Electric’s largest shareholders are Vanguard and Blackrock, owning 10% and 9% of the company, respectively, while management owns less than 3% of the shares outstanding[90]. For how much longer can the company maintain its distinct culture? Would management be permitted to borrow large amounts of money for bonuses again if it encountered another crisis?
[1] Borrowing the term from James O’Toole’s book, The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried to Do Well by Doing Good, (Harper Business, 2019)
[2] Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth Of Nations, (Grapevine Kindle Edition, 2023), p.535
[3] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Illustrated), Kindle Edition, p.1
[4] By “ethical decisions”, I don’t mean to attach a positive or negative attribute to those decisions, in the sense that they are the “right” decisions. Rather, I simply mean that the decisions required us to weigh up ethical considerations.
[5] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, A History, (History Enterprises, Inc, 1999), p.15-16
[6] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.12
[7] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.16-17
[8] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.17
[9] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.18
[10] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.25-26
[11] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.5
[12] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.23
[13] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.26
[14] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.34
[15] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.34-35
[16] James O’Toole, Enlightened Capitalists, p.98
[17] Donald F. Hastings, “Lincoln Electric’s Harsh Lessons From International Expansion” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1999, https://hbr.org/1999/05/lincoln-electrics-harsh-lessons-from-international-expansion.
[18] James O’Toole, Enlightened Capitalists, p.94-95
[19] Lincoln Electric 2023 Annual Report and Proxy Statement, F-34
[20] Frank Koller, Spark: How Old-Fashioned Values Drive a Twenty-First-Century Corporation: Lessons from Lincoln Electric's Unique Guaranteed Employment Program, (PublicAffairs, 2011), p.45
[21] Frank Koller, Spark, p.172
[22] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p,83
[23] Donald F. Hastings, “Lincoln Electric’s Harsh Lessons From International Expansion”
[24] Frank Koller, Spark, p.76
[25] Bloomberg data, retrieved July 1, 2024
[26] Frank Koller, Spark, p.15-16
[27] James O’Toole, Enlightened Capitalists, p.55-57
[28] James F. Lincoln, Incentive Management, (The Lincoln Electric Company, 1951), p.12
[29] James F. Lincoln, Incentive Management, p.14
[30] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.32
[31] Frank Koller, Spark, p.21
[32] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.38
[33] Frank Koller, Spark, p.94
[34] Lincoln Electric 2023 Annual Report and Proxy Statement, p.6
[35] Frank Koller, Spark, p.95
[36] Frank Koller, Spark, p.44
[37] Frank Koller, Spark, p.61
[38] Frank Koller, Spark, p.47
[39] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.39
[40] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.49
[41] Frank Koller, Spark, p.40
[42] Frank Koller, Spark, p.43
[43] Frank Koller, Spark, p.40
[44] Frank Koller, Spark, p.45
[45] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.32
[46] James F. Lincoln, A New Approach to Industrial Economics, (The Devin-Adair Company, 1961), p.88
[47] Frank Koller, Spark, p.72
[48] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.33
[49] James F. Lincoln, A New Approach to Industrial Economics, p.132-133
[50] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.55-61
[51] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.76
[52] Frank Koller, Spark, p.29
[53] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.83
[54] ibid
[55] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.115
[56] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.109-110
[57] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.119
[58] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.121
[59] ibid
[60] ibid
[61] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.128
[62] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.124
[63] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.129
[64] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.130
[65] ibid
[66] William Serrin, “The Way That Works At Lincoln”, New York Times, Jan 15 1984
[67] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.130
[68] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.133
[69] ibid
[70] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.137
[71] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.138
[72] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.139
[73] Donald F. Hastings, “Lincoln Electric’s Harsh Lessons From International Expansion”
[74] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.140-141
[75] Donald F. Hastings, “Lincoln Electric’s Harsh Lessons From International Expansion”
[76] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.141
[77] Donald F. Hastings, “Lincoln Electric’s Harsh Lessons From International Expansion”
[78] ibid
[79] ibid
[80] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.143
[81] Donald F. Hastings, “Lincoln Electric’s Harsh Lessons From International Expansion”
[82] ibid
[83] ibid
[84] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.145
[85] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.148
[86] Frank Koller, Spark, p.170
[87] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.143
[88] Frank Koller, Spark, p.171-172
[89] Virginia P. Dawson, Lincoln Electric, p.129
[90] Lincoln Electric 2023 Annual Report and Proxy Statement, p.99-102