The county’s largest aerospace and defense contractors saw another solid year of growth as gains in commercial aviation and military spending offset a loss of jobs at Boeing Co.
The 25 largest contractors grew Orange County jobs by 4% in the past year, bringing employment to 26,556, according to this week’s Business Journal list.
Nearly all of the companies,22,added jobs or held employment steady. Two more than doubled their employment.
Boeing, by far the largest player on the list, saw a decline of 500 people in the past year to 11,900 workers, a 4% drop.
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The company, which represents 45% of the jobs on the list, has been growing for the past few years, posting a 2% gain a year ago.
Boeing officials cited movement of workers to other programs and “normal attrition” for this year’s decline.
“Employment levels in Orange County are stable,” said Gary Toyama, Boeing’s vice president for the Southern California region. “Our focus in 2006 is on program execution, which embraces cost efficiencies, lean manufacturing and continuous improvement.”
OC is home to some of Boeing’s most cutting edge work for the Pentagon, Toyama said. That includes the Future Combat Systems project,a super network for the Army,and the company’s Space and Intelligence Systems headquarters in Seal Beach.
The county likely will lose Boeing’s Delta Rocket program in Huntington Beach. As part of a planned satellite combination with Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing is set to shift about 1,000 workers to Denver, where the Boeing-Lockheed venture will be based.
Another wild card: Boeing recently said it could sell or close its Connexion unit in Irvine. The struggling operation provides commercial airlines with in-flight-entertainment systems.
Without the losses at Boeing, the 24 other contractors grew employment by 13% to 14,656 people in the past year.
A year ago, the largest contractors here grew employment by 5%. Two years ago, they grew jobs at a 6% pace.
In 2002, when the Business Journal started the aerospace and defense contractors list, the companies lost 8% of their workers amid the aerospace downturn.
Some companies grew in the past year with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others rose with an overall rise in military spending. A commercial aviation comeback, which is playing out in Boeing’s rivalry with Airbus SAS, drove others.
After a couple years of rapid consolidation, acquisitions came to a halt early this year,largely because there aren’t many sizable targets left.
Only Costa Mesa based-Ceradyne Inc., a maker of body armor for soldiers, remains locally based among companies on the list.
The consolidation prompted a reworking of our list. Several entries now are listed by their parent companies with a breakdown of the local operations.
That includes No. 3 Bellevue, Wash.-based Esterline Technologies Corp., which added more than 130 employees to its local work force in the past year, an 11% gain.
Esterline owns Brea-based Kirkhill-TA Co. and bought Buena Park’s Leach International Corp. in 2004 and Palomar Products Inc. of Rancho Santa Margarita in 2005.
The wars, military spending and commercial aviation are driving the operations, said Bob Cremin, Esterline’s chief executive.
“About 20% of our revenue is in Orange County,” Cremin said. “We see Orange County as sort of a technological center of a lot of things we do.”
Esterline has yearly sales of about $840 million.
No. 4 C & D; Zodiac, part of France’s Zodiac SA, grew 4% to 1,292 workers in Huntington Beach. C & D; makes cabin equipment for commercial jets.
Alcoa Fastening Systems Inc. held on to the No. 5 spot with growth of 5%, pushing it past 1,000 workers at its two Fullerton sites.
The company has fed off the boom in commercial aircraft growth, providing the fasteners that hold the parts in place on big jetliners.
Alcoa’s challenge: finding enough skilled machinists to keep up with demand.
No. 6 Ceradyne turned in another year of big growth with a 24% increase in OC workers, now totaling more than 1,000. Ceradyne moved up from No. 7 on last year’s list.
The company makes bulletproof ceramic armor for soldiers and vehicles.
The fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan is driving Ceradyne, though the company is seeing some slowing.
“The growth continues, but not at the same clip as it was over the past couple of years,” Chief Executive Joel Moskowitz said.
The biggest gainer by jobs was No. 7 Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based Rockwell Collins Inc., which added 445 jobs to its OC operations in the past year.
The company, which makes in-flight entertainment systems for commercial jets, consolidated its Southern California units in Tustin during the past few months.
At No. 8 is a tie between two related companies, the Fullerton operation of Waltham, Mass.-based Raytheon Corp. and ThalesRaytheonSystems Inc., a venture of Paris-based Thales and Raytheon.
The operations employ 750 people each at Raytheon’s Fullerton campus. We’ve listed them separately because of the split ownership at ThalesRaytheonSystems.
Another separate but related entry: No. 11 Thales Avionics, an Irvine unit of Thales that also does in-flight entertainment systems. It boosted employment to 700 people, a 133% gain.
The biggest decliner on the list was No. 24 Irvin Aerospace Inc. in Santa Ana, which is part of Airborne Systems Group in Pennsauken, N.J.
The maker of military parachutes saw a 19% drop to 164 workers as military demand for parachutes has waned from the early days of the Iraq war, President Dave Berry said.
Irvin is hoping to land a new contract with NASA for parachutes, Berry said.
