Among Orange County’s largest private companies, distribution is king.
This week’s Business Journal list of the top 45 private companies is heavy with movers of food, petroleum, metal and other goods. Seven of the companies,including four of the top 10,are involved in the distribution of products or services.
The biggest new entrant to this year’s list is, in fact, a distributor: Irvine-based Advantage Sales and Marketing LLC, a food brokerage firm. The company debuted at No. 1 with sales of $25 billion, up 79% from last year (see related story, page 62).
Not only is Advantage OC’s largest private company, it’s one of the largest companies of any type here. Its sales represented half of the total revenue posted by the 45 companies on the list. If Advantage were public, it would rank No. 2 to Santa Ana-based Ingram Micro Inc. and above Orange-based Bergen Brunswig Corp., two other distributors.
Besides distributors, OC’s private companies span the local economy, from electronics makers and a media company to auto dealers and real estate companies. The list ranks the companies by 2000 revenue and includes several estimates.
The private companies posted faster sales growth than their largest publicly traded counterparts and also improved their efficiency in the past year by churning out more sales per employee.
Companies on the list range from $25 billion to $143 million in sales for the past year. While many of the sectors represented on the list may have a stodgy appeal to some, some companies posted sales growth as high as 92%. Others saw a decline of 10% or more.
Including the acquisition-fueled growth at Advantage Sales & Marketing, companies on the list grew sales by a collective 39%, compared with their own year-ago results.
The 45 companies reported revenue totaling $48.07 billion, including Business Journal estimates for companies that declined to provide numbers. Still, the combined revenue of the private companies is about 56% lower than that of the 45 largest public companies.
Advantage Sales was responsible for 27% of the sales growth. Excluding the company from the mix, sales at the 44 other companies grew by 13%,still impressive when compared to the 5% growth posted by the 50 largest public companies based here.
The private companies also added more jobs in the past 12 months. The private companies employ 25,541 in OC and 109,170 company-wide. Locally, employment grew by 4%, or by 1,024 jobs. The companies, several of which only have headquarters here, grew total employment by 10% in the past 12 months.
The list includes four companies in electronics or computer hardware that employ close to 1,900 people in OC. Kingston Technology Co., the Fountain Valley-based maker of computer memory products, maintained its ranking at No. 4 on this year’s list. The company had $1.7 billion in revenue, up 21% from last year. Kingston, which recently laid off workers, posted a 3% drop to 1,114 people locally.
The list includes five auto dealerships, which together contributed about 4.5% of the total sales of the private companies. No. 7 Orange-based David Wilson Automotive Group was the largest privately owned car dealership in OC with revenue of $1.09 billion, up 56% from last year. The company employed some 679 people in OC (see related story below).
No. 6 Newport Beach-based The Irvine Company is the most efficient company on the list by operations. The company had $3 million in sales per employee, down from $4 million last year, but still the highest on the list. Advantage Sales had a 25% increase in sales per employee as its sales grew from $2 million per worker to $2.5 million.
No. 18 St. John Knits Inc. of Irvine is the largest private company employer in OC with 2,500 workers. The apparel maker produces garments from its Irvine headquarters. No. 2 ranked Pacific Life Insurance Co. is the second biggest employer on the list with 2,461 people in OC.
Two companies dropped off the list: Newport Beach-based American Restaurant Group Inc., which sold a portion of the company, and Santa Ana’s SimpleTech Inc., which went public.
Besides Advantage Sales, there were seven other newcomers: No. 24 Newport Beach-based Pacific Bay Homes; No. 27 Irvine-based Sares-Regis Group; No. 29 Irvine-based The Linksys Group Inc.; No. 31 Costa Mesa-based Tarsadia Hotels; No. 35 Newport Beach-based Galardi Group Inc., operator of Wienerschnitzel; No. 36 Los Alamitos-based Trend Offset Printing; and No. 44 Tustin-based Cherokee International LLC. n
