Orange County has reeled in a big fish in the technology industry with the addition of ViewSonic Corp. to its strong corporate base.
The visual products maker brings about 90 jobs to its new headquarters in Brea and more than $1 billion in revenue, cementing a position as one the county’s largest private companies.
Next week, the maker of LED monitors, projectors, digital signage displays and other products will debut its 25,000-square-foot headquarters on the second floor of 10 Pointe Drive off the Orange (57) Freeway.
ViewSonic, which had been based in Walnut in eastern Los Angeles County for its entire 27-year history, signed a 10-year lease.
The company chose North OC over other locales because of the region’s deep talent pool, the proximity of employees who live in and near Walnut, and to highlight its ongoing transition to new market segments.
“We were looking at our lease and the next evolution of product categories, and we decided it would be a value to become an Orange County resident,” said Jeff Volpe, president of ViewSonic Americas. “It’s very much a hotbed for technology.”
The company would be ranked among the top 14 private companies in OC, according to Business Journal research, in the same neighborhood as Santa Ana-based security and janitorial service provider Universal Services of America, which had $1.1 billion in revenue, and L.A. Fitness club operator Fitness International LLC in Irvine, which has about $1.2 billion in annual sales. ViewSonic employs about 600 companywide.
The manufacturer moved its Walnut warehouse operations into a 150,000-square-foot distribution center in Chino as part of the relocation. The space is about 30% smaller than its previous warehouse, a reflection of rising demand for smaller, thinner and lighter products that take up about a fifth of the space as earlier models did a few years ago. The company is also leveraging distributors that operate giant warehouses in the Inland Empire, including the county’s largest revenue generator, Santa Ana-based Ingram Micro Inc.
“We don’t need the same kind of space that we needed in the past,” Volpe said.
Some of the cost savings was poured into a multimillion-dollar renovation plan that lasted a year and included gutting the interior and developing a state-of-the-art Visual Experience Center.
The company hired architects, designers and feng shui masters to create an open-concept, ergonomic floorplan with plenty of ambient light to foster a collaborative work environment, Volpe said.
The showroom is loaded with high-definition monitors, audio systems, interactive and touch-screen displays with 4K resolution, and a 26-foot curved wall that reflects images blended together from two projectors.
The space allows the company to showcase new products and services, such as cloud computing, virtual desktops, and interactive displays, for the medical, education, finance, government and gambling sectors, among others. It can mimic real-time work settings.
“We want to supply them with a solution around a variety of products,” Volpe said.
Union Station in Los Angeles and the Las Vegas sportsbook Lagasse’s Stadium at The Palazzo are known to use its displays.
ViewSonic generates more than 70% of its annual revenue from business customers and relies on online retailers, such as amazon.com, newegg.com and tigerdirect.com, to reach consumers.
It had long relied on in-store sales to push computer and related products but abandoned that strategy in 2007 as online retail gained prominence.
Chairman and Chief Executive James Chu established the company in 1987 as Keypoint Technology Corp. The Taiwan native relied on Asian contractors to churn out its first products, a business model the company still employs. Its American unit leads product design and road maps.
Chu changed the name to ViewSonic in 1990 to emphasize its latest product line: colored monitors, a significant innovation at the time that would eventually replace monochrome displays around the world.
By the mid-1990s, it had become a leading seller of colored monitors in Europe and one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the U.S.
It grew into a market-share leader in the LCD monitor segment by 2000 behind then-bellwethers Dell, Compaq, Gateway and Hewlett-Packard.
ViewSonic topped $1.5 billion in sales at its peak in 2006 and considered an initial public offering the following year seeking to raise upward of $143 million in a Nasdaq offering, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The company withdrew the IPO request in March 2008, saying the “terms currently obtainable in the public marketplace are not sufficiently attractive.”
Later that month, Bear Stearns collapsed and was acquired by JPMorgan as the global economy entered the last recession.
