It was a good run.
Cooper Cos., a maker of contact lenses and women’s surgical products, is ending its time as an Orange County-based company with the appointment of a new chief executive.
“Yes, in fact, we will be de-emphasizing OC,” said Robert Weiss, who took over as Cooper’s boss on Sept. 1.
With the move, Cooper’s formal base switches to the Bay area city of Pleasanton, where Weiss and other officials, including Chief Financial Officer Steve Neil, are based.
That means transferring most of the primary functions of the company from Lake Forest to Pleasanton, Weiss said.
A 30-year Cooper veteran, Weiss took over the top job from longtime leader Tom Bender. Weiss previously was chief operating officer and president of CooperVision, the company’s dominant contact lens division.
OC is losing a company that brought in $850 million in revenue last year and counted a market value of $2.2 billion at recent check.
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Cooper’s Lake Forest site: company keeping first floor for now |
Cooper always has had something of a split identity. In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company has listed Pleasanton as its headquarters. But Bender and other top executives had been working in Lake Forest, making it the company’s actual base.
Cooper plans to keep the first floor of its Bake Parkway office in Lake Forest for Bender, who had been chief executive since 1995, and B. Norris Battin, its director of investor relations. Both are set to serve in some capacity into 2008, according to Weiss.
This move didn’t come as a complete shock to Cooper’s 25 OC employees. Cooper had been shrinking its local operations for a while, including the 2005 closure of a contact lens plant in Huntington Beach.
“Since we closed the Huntington Beach operation, we haven’t had much of a presence in Orange County, to be honest with you,” Bender said in an earlier interview.
The effort to find a successor for Bender started a year ago, according to Weiss.
Cooper looked at candidates inside the company and out, he said. The company started grooming Weiss for the chief executive role in April when it added the presidency of the CooperVision unit to his plate.
“My job was to execute,” he said. “In the background all this other stuff was going on. I stayed out of it.”
Cooper has faced a number of challenges in recent years, including absorbing the 2005 acquisition of Ocular Sciences Inc. and a delay in coming out with a new type of contact lens, Biofinity.
Earlier this year, there was talk that France’s Essilor SA may be interested in buying Cooper. But the same challenges scared off the company.
Cooper still isn’t past its issues, according to Peter Bye, a Jefferies & Co. analyst.
The company “faces numerous challenges that will negatively impact its sales and (earnings per share) for the next several years,” wrote Bye, who has a “hold” rating on Cooper’s stock.
Eight analysts now rate Cooper as “neutral,” while two recommend buying it.
“The big question out there on Wall Street has been: Is the integration that we’ve done in the last three years real?” Weiss said. “There’s no backing off of that three-year integration plan.”
Bender and Weiss helped develop the company’s strategy together. So Weiss said he doesn’t anticipate a difficult transition.
“Tom and I have worked hand-in-hand for 15 years, and are pretty consistent in our thinking about where the company is going and how to get there,” said Weiss, 60, who came to Cooper in 1977.
In Weiss’ time with Cooper, the company, previously known as Cooper Laboratories, was more diversified than it is today. Its acquisitions swung from buying the Oral-B toothbrush line to psychiatric hospitals.
“Cooper’s been in and out of most every market in healthcare,” Weiss said.
In the late 1980s, Cooper, then based in Palo Alto, sold off most of its businesses after a slew of lawsuits, a shareholder fight and insider trading charges against some of its executives.
Weiss wants to continue narrowing the company’s focus to turn the corner with the Biofinity hydrogel lens problems as operations are consolidated in Northern California.
