‘Little 104’ a Varied Bunch, Burning Cash and Growing Jobs
To get a flavor of the wide variety of businesses in Orange County, check out the bottom tier on this week’s list of publicly owned companies.
These 104 companies, the smallest OC-based public companies as ranked by revenue, run the gamut, from a company that makes advanced ceramics (Ceradyne) to one that sells tickets on-line (Tickets.com). There is a dealer of rare coins and fine art (Tangible Asset Galleries) and a manager of psychiatric care for hospitals (Optimumcare).
Golf buffs will be able to identify with a golf course builder (CEC Properties Inc.), a golf web portal (Internet Golf Association) and a marketer of golf clubs (GolfGear International).
One has a funny name (Dippy Foods) with $200,000 in sales, another has a grandiose name (World Shopping Network) and no sales. Largo Vista is a Newport Beach-based company with a Spanish name that trades in gas and oil in China.
And then there is Pacific Biometrics of Lake Forest, which posted $1.6 million in revenue in 1999 and a $6.4 million loss. Its phone calls are being forwarded to its office in Seattle. It was unable to hire a firm to do its year-end audit and its landlord has won a court judgment for $150,000 related to the default of its lease.
A couple dozen of the companies have payrolls of 100 or more, while several don’t list any full-time workers at all. The company with the most revenue in 1999 was Litronic Inc. at $31.7 million; 18 of the companies showed no revenue or didn’t report their results.
FutureLink boasts the biggest market cap on the list, $1.2 billion, while Time Financial Services checks in with the lowest market cap, of only $700,000. Techniclone has no sales, but shows a market cap of $514 million.
A caveat: the market caps are as of April 3. Since then, the market gyrations have changed many of the companies’ valuations significantly. As of April 27, FutureLink and Techniclone had seen their market caps roughly halved from the April 3 level, to $610 million and $364 million, respectively.
Biggest Sectors
The most prevalent sectors represented by this bottom tier: Technology (38 companies), healthcare products (17 companies), banking (nine) and biotech (eight).
This third and final list concludes this year’s ranking of OC’s public companies. The data was provided both by Roth Capital Partners and our own research staff, headed by Ludmilla Salvacion.
Altogether, the three lists identified 204 public companies. It is the most comprehensive ranking to date of publicly traded companies with their headquarters based in Orange County.
These small companies showed mixed results when compared with their bigger OC counterparts. Revenue-wise, they lagged: Their sales were up 5% in 1999 from a year earlier (to $813 million), but that was well below the double-digit percentage increases posted by the biggest 50 and the middle 50 public companies.
Job Growth
But employment-wise, their growth rate out-paced the other two groups: The little 104 grew OC jobs by 17% in the past year, to 5,239, compared with rates of 4% and 9% for the big and middle pubcos. Company-wide, the small companies grew by 31%, to 9,799 jobs.
One thing that distinguishes this group of small public companies is the rate at which they burn money.
Seventy-five of the 104 companies posted losses. And while the big 50 public companies posted an aggregate record profit in 1999 of $2 billion, and the middle 50 companies reduced their year-to-year losses to $23 million, this small group of 103 lost $430 million, 20% more than they lost in 1998.
Among the companies growing the fastest in sales on this list are: No. 128 FutureLink Corp. of Irvine, up 467% to $14 million; No. 142 Biolase Technology Inc. of San Clemente, up 378% to $7 million; No. 114 StarBase Corp. of Santa Ana, up 368% to $22 million; No. 101 Litronic Inc. of Irvine, up 376% to $32 million; No. 131 Telenetics Corp. of Lake Forest., up 227% to $12 million; No. 104 Tickets.com of Costa Mesa, up 154% to $30 million; and No. 107 McGlen Internet Group of Tustin, up 139% to $27 million.
Fast Climber
The biggest climber up the list was StarBase, which rose 29 spots from last year’s list to No. 114. Several companies made their first appearance on the list, with highest ranked being Litronic at No. 101.
The biggest drop on the list was Consumer Portfolio Services Inc., which fell 64 spots to the No. 126 position. It said it didn’t sell contracts in securitization transactions and this caused its sales to decline by 88%, which is the largest decline on the list.
Other companies with large percentage declines in revenues included: No. 113 STM Wireless Inc. of Irvine, down 47% to $22 million; No. 143 Radiance Medical Systems Inc. of Irvine, down 45% to $8.7 million; No. 159 Pacific Biometrics of Lake Forest, down 40% to $1.6 million; No. 135 EMB Corp., down 43% to $10.5 million; No. 139 Pinnacle Micro Inc. of Rancho Santa Margarita, down 28% to $7.7 million; and No. 109 NAB Asset Corp., down 24% to $27 million;
Profit Grower
No. 103 I-Flow Corp. of Lake Forest posted the largest profit gain, increasing 700% to $8.8 million.
Those companies posting turnarounds included: Dense-Pac Microsystems Inc. of Garden Grove, from a $3.6 million loss in 1998 to a $5.5 million profit last year; and No. 106 General Automation of Irvine, from $11 million loss in 1998 to a $410,000 profit in 1999.
The companies with the biggest increases in losses include: Tickets.com, from $6 million in 1997 to $35 million in 1998; Consumer Portfolio Services, from a $25.7 million profit in 1998 to a $44.5 million loss last year; and FutureLink, from a $6 million loss in 1998 to a $35.6 million loss last year.
Employee-wise, the companies growing the fastest in Orange County were: FutureLink, up 400% to 171 employees; Tickets.com, up 200% to 120 employees; and No. 111 I/O Magic Corp. of Irvine, up 169% to 70 employees. Company-wide, the fastest-growing company was Irvine-based IJNT.net, up 819% to 763 employees.
The company shrinking its Orange County presence the most was No. 120 Pen Interconnect Inc. of Irvine, from 212 employees to four, a 98% downsizing, mostly because it sold off its divisions.
