Joe Kiani, chief executive of Masimo Corp., is the Business Journal’s businessperson of the year for 2007 after taking the Irvine medical device maker public and having the best performing local stock of the past year.
In August, Kiani staged the most successful initial public offering for an Orange County company in years, raising $233 million, including $48 million for Masimo.
The company’s shares closed up 23% in their first day of trading and have kept on climbing. Masimo’s stock had doubled since its debut with a recent $2.2 billion market value, making it the best performing local stock of 2007.
“2007 was a lucky year for us, like a lucky No. 7,” Kiani said. “It was, in many ways, a year we got to realize the fruits of our labor for so many years.”
The Business Journal also named a runner-up for 2007 businessperson of the year, as well as an honorable mention and another worth noting.
Mike Morhaime, chief executive of Irvine’s Blizzard Entertainment Inc., was runner-up for his role in the biggest 2007 deal involving an OC company.
Online video game maker Blizzard was the driving force behind parent Vivendi’s $19 billion December deal to buy Activision Inc.
France’s Vivendi plans to combine Blizzard with Santa Monica-based Activision and end up with a 68% stake in the business, dubbed Activision Blizzard.
The move is set to make Activision Blizzard the biggest video game developer with yearly sales of $4 billion, propelling it ahead of longtime industry kingpin Electronic Arts Inc.
The honorable mention went to Broadcom Corp. Chief Executive Scott McGregor, who won a series of victories in a critical fight with rival Qualcomm Inc.
The wins stood out in an otherwise tough year for Broadcom, which saw a $2.2 billion bill for restating past results to fix stock options, a federal probe of former executives and a lackluster year on Wall Street.
Our business person of the year package, which appears in the Dec. 31 print edition, also includes one other executive we felt was worth noting for the impact he had: Brad Morrice of New Century Financial Corp.
If we’d chosen our businessperson of the year based on the amount of national media attention a local executive’s company saw in 2007, it would have been no contest for Morrice.
Morrice, who stepped down from Irvine-based New Century in June, saw his company garner far more attention than any other OC company in the past year.
Unfortunately for Morrice, his company was in the news for all the wrong reasons, as bankrupt New Century became the poster child for troubles in subprime mortgages.
Still, we felt it was worth noting the impact Morrice and New Century had, ushering in the collapse of an entire sector–subprime mortgages–that was heavily concentrated in the county.
The company’s downfall was in many cases the tip of the iceberg for a business whose implosion still is being felt locally and on Wall Street, not to mention in communities across the country that are being plagued by rising foreclosures.
For more on these stories, please see the Dec. 31 edition of the Business Journal.
