Arco remains county's largest public company.The List proves businesses here are a diversified lot The biggest company in Los Angeles Los Angeles (lôs ăn`jələs, lŏs, ăn`jəlēz'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. County, ranked by 1994 revenues, remained oil giant Atlantic Richfield Co., which posted $17.2 billion in sales for the year, head and shoulders above all other concerns on this week's List of 100 largest publicly traded companies publicly traded company A company whose shares of common stock are held by the public and are available for purchase by investors. The shares of publicly traded firms are bought and sold on the organized exchanges or in the over-the-counter market. (see pages 19-22). But that doesn't necessarily mean Arco was the biggest in all ways. In market capitalization Market Capitalization A measure of a public company's size. Market capitalization is the total dollar value of all outstanding shares. It's calculated by multiplying the number of shares times the current market price. This term is often referred to as market cap. , for example, perennial favorite Wait Disney Co. emerges as king, with a jumbo market cap of $28 billion in 1994. That's almost $10 billion more than Arco's. (Of course, pending the recent announced merger with Capital Cities/ABC, Disney will become even more impressive on next year's List). It is interesting that the market caps of Disney and Arco are so far apart - in earnings in 1994, they are close, at $919 million for Arco and $1.11 billion for Disney. But Disney is in the entertainment-media industry, the growth field that has captured the investors' fancy. Most expect Disney to keep growing - while Arco must fend its way through the tricky oil business, and oil prices that have been flat to down since the 1970s - and, indeed, Arco revenues have been stable all through the 1990s. Land of the giants The biggest local employer on the list is defense contractor Noun 1. defense contractor - a contractor concerned with the development and manufacture of systems of defense armed forces, armed services, military, military machine, war machine - the military forces of a nation; "their military is the largest in the region"; Northrop Grumman Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) is an aerospace and defense conglomerate that is the result of the 1994 purchase of Grumman by Northrop. The company is the third largest defense contractor for the U.S. Corp., with 18,200 on payroll in the county -although that is down from 30,000 five years ago. While Los Angeles is widely regarded as a middle market town, there are some biggies here too: There are 31 companies on The List with 1994 sales in excess of $1 billion maybe not in league with IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) or Ford, but still not exactly the bush leagues, either. On last year's List, only 30 companies were in the billion-dollar club, indicating some growth at the top end of the corporate market. A fast climber on this year's List is Merisel, Inc., the computer hardware and software distributor. The company posted revenues in excess of $5 billion in 1994, way up (mostly due to a merger) from 1993's $3.08 billion in revenues. With the big revenues surge, Merisel jumped from the 15 spot to No. 7. No. 100 on The List is struggling apparel-maker Cherokee Inc., which had 1994 sales of $114.1 million. The trend to corporate downsizing (1) Converting mainframe and mini-based systems to client/server LANs. (2) To reduce equipment and associated costs by switching to a less-expensive system. (jargon) downsizing is clearly seen in this year's List, which asked companies to state employment as of May 1995 and five years earlier. Only a generation ago, almost any large corporation regarded as one of its prerogatives the right to grow - either by acquisition (even conglomeration con·glom·er·a·tion n. 1. a. The act or process of conglomerating. b. The state of being conglomerated. 2. An accumulation of miscellaneous things. ) or increasing sales. Some say this was growth at all costs and was simple empire-building, and not related to generating the biggest earnings for shareholders. Name of the game Today, profit is key - and if greater profits can be had by trimming down, so be it. Thus, such companies as Arco, Occidental Petroleum Occidental Petroleum Corporation ("Oxy") NYSE: OXY is an international oil and gas exploration and production company with operations in the United States, Middle East/North Africa and Latin America regions. , Unocal Corp., First Interstate, Times Minor, Avery Dennison, California Federal Bank California Federal Bank, often abbreviated to "Cal Fed", was a savings and loan bank in California. It existed from 1926 until 2002, when its parent company Golden State Bancorp was acquired by Citigroup, resulting in the bank being merged into Citibank. , Coast Savings, Micropolis, Arden Group, Cal Mat, House of Fabrics and many other companies on The List all reported smaller staffs. Some attribute the new "lean and mean" look to the advent of the junk-bond financed buyout, which makes any over-staffed company a target for takeover artists, who will buy a fat company and trim it down. Others say that large corporations are just too cumbersome in today's fast-changing economies, and so they are shrinking due to market forces. All the employment growth is in the little companies. In any event, it is clearly not a given any more that even huge corporations, with access to capital and the horsepower to market worldwide, will grow in sales or staff from year to year. The 10 biggest companies in Los Angeles are a diversified lot, with the oil, entertainment, utility, defense, software, food processing, and banking industries all represented. |
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