MagTek Inc., a maker of credit-card readers for stores, banks and gas stations, is moving its headquarters from Los Angeles County to Orange County this week.
Privately held MagTek is moving to Seal Beach from Carson, where it’s been for more than 30 years.
The company is setting up shop in the Pacific Gateway Business Center where it bought a 108,000-square-foot building for $16 million.
The move more than doubles MagTek’s space and brings another woman chief executive to the county.
Annmarie “Mimi” Hart, a Boston native, has run MagTek since 2003.
The Business Journal estimates MagTek has yearly revenue of $75 million to $125 million.
The company, which is set have 190 workers here, had been looking for a new home for more than four years.
“We’ve been at these particular facilities for 30 years and we were bursting at the seams” in Carson, Hart said. “We looked at trying to renovate and make better use of the space. But it really wasn’t enough no matter how efficient we were.”
The move means a longer drive for Hart, who lives in Manhattan Beach. But Seal Beach fit the bill for her workers with nearby restaurants, shops and gyms, she said.
“I’m going to be the one with the bad commute,” Hart said.
The company looked at San Pedro and as far south as Irvine for a building.
“We could find space to lease but we wanted to purchase,” Hart said. “With the one or two we found periodically we were beat out and somebody else got to it first.”
Gardena-based Overton Moore Properties built the 830,000-square-foot Pacific Gateway Business Center as buildings for sale on land formerly owned by Boeing Co.
The new building was outfitted for MagTek. About 40% of it is warehouse space, 35% is manufacturing and the rest is offices for engineers and salespeople.
A little more than half of the company’s workers are on the manufacturing side, Hart said.
“We are really committed to a strong manufacturing workforce locally,” she said. “That’s part of the value proposition of our company.”
The site also houses MagTek’s subsidiary Magensa LLC, which sells subscription-based authentication software to banks and retailers.
Products
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Seal Beach building: 108,000 square feet |
You’ve probably used one of MagTek’s products.
“Every time you use an ATM or swipe a card, it’s very likely you are using our technology,” Hart said. “We are a big supplier to companies that make ATMs, kiosks, gas pumps and cash register checkout devices.”
MagTek is probably best known for making magnetic stripe readers that scan and transmit card information. The company has roughly half the market for readers, Hart said.
It uses security technology that encrypts and authenticates card data when it is swiped.
That’s different from how it was done in years past, when data wasn’t encrypted until it was stored by the retailer.
“We are moving away from ones that just read and transmit credit card information,” Hart said. “Now the data is scrambled at the earliest point so that merchants and employees can’t see it either.”
MagTek’s technology is aimed at cutting down on credit card fraud and identity theft, Hart said.
One of its products, called MagnePrint, reads a unique magnetic “fingerprint” of each card.
“Each magnetic stripe made has this fingerprint that exists regardless of what data has been encoded on it,” Hart said.
The anti-counterfeiting measure is aimed at stopping thieves who make fake credit cards from stolen account numbers.
MagTek also makes check readers,small scanners that transmit checks to banks electronically and read magnetic ink to verify that they are real.
And the company makes personal identification number pads that are sold to banks and other financial companies.
“We are authenticating the device because we don’t want anyone to put a rogue device on the terminal that collects the information,” Hart said.
MagTek sells half of what it makes directly to customers. The other half is sold to companies that put its readers into their own products, such as makers of ATMs, restaurant cash registers and electronic hotel room locks.
Hart, 54, has been associated with MagTek in one way or another since its beginning.
She started there as a sales representative 33 years ago.
Hart later went on to start Marblehead, Mass.-based Express Card Systems Inc., a reseller of MagTek products.
In the mid 1990s, she served as an adviser to the company and was elected to its board of directors in 1999.
Changes
Hart has put her own stamp on MagTek since landing the top spot five years ago.
“There has been a cultural change in the last few years,” she said.
For one, she put measures in place to make MagTek faster at getting out its products and adopting security technologies.
“We had a tendency to be a research and development-focused company that made great products, but they didn’t always come out on time,” she said. “We lost some opportunities there because we were too slow to respond.”
She zeroed in on the security needs of retailers and banks, which are under increasing pressure from the government to provide better safeguards.
“We cannot become a commodity company,” Hart said. “I’ve tried to promote a major concentration on how security adds value.”
