No-Name Achievers
COMMENT
by Rick Reiff and Mike Mason
WITH THE TECH BUST HAVING TAKEN SOME OF THE AIR OUT OF Broadcom’s expectations, Orange County once again finds itself lacking the kind of corporate giant or giant-in-the-making that can define and galvanize a business community.
Oh, well. At least Broadcom is lurching along, and there are plenty of other sizeable, if not gigantic, companies to give Orange County stock market cachet. Consider BusinessWeek’s recent ranking of the best-performing public companies.
Among the magazine’s top 50-performing biggest companies, those in the S & P; 500 index, none were based in Orange County. On the other hand, there were two OC-based companies among the magazine’s top 50 S & P; MidCap 400 performers and three OC-based companies in the magazine’s top 50 from the S & P; SmallCap 600.
Given that Orange County rounds to 1% of the U.S. population, the pro-rated representation of OC-based companies on such lists, all other things being equal, should be about one in a hundred. In the case of these 150 BusinessWeek entries, then, you’d expect one or two of the companies to be from OC.
But OC actually had five companies on the lists. Now, that could be a statistical anomaly, except that such over-representation of OC almost always occurs when somebody does these sorts of lists.
In other words, such lists tend to support OC’s claim to being a place of innovative growth companies. It’s just not a place of really big companies. You could say that OC’s business community mirrors the Anaheim Angels, who are the defending world champions of baseball despite the lack of a superstar player.
And with that Opening Day transition, let’s close this editorial.
, Rick Reiff, Mike Mason
