Entravision, Univision, Molina Make Grade on Hispanic Index
WALL STREET WEST
Three locally based companies have been selected for a new equity index portfolio that will give investors exposure to the fast-growing Hispanic market in the United States.
The Ramirez Hispanic Index Equally-Weighted Portfolio includes 10 U.S. companies. Among them are Spanish-language media companies Entravision Communications Corp. of Santa Monica and Univision Communications Inc. (Los Angeles), along with Long Beach-based HMO Molina Healthcare Inc.
The portfolio operates like a mutual fund that is tied to indexes such as the S & P; 500. It arose out of investor interest in the Ramirez & Co. Hispanic Index, which was launched in December, said Sam Ramirez Jr., a senior vice president at New York-based Samuel A. Ramirez & Co.
“It’s the first real investment targeted on the Hispanic market in particular in the U.S. as a whole,” Ramirez said. He added there are several dozen Hispanic companies, mostly in California, Texas, New York and Florida, that could go public in the not-too-distant future.
“Our job is going to be to find Hispanic companies that are gaining market share,” Ramirez said.
The firm took a methodical approach to defining what is and isn’t a Hispanic firm, said David Takata, chief executive of Engage Capital, a Newport Beach-based corporate advisory and research firm.
“More importantly,” he said, “(the portfolio) probably shows that there’s a growing awareness of this market in the investment community, whereas to date it’s been more actively discussed by demographers, advertisers and those sorts.”
Anthony Palazzo
M & A; Merger
Barrington Associates, the middle-market financial advisory in Brentwood, has acquired boutique investment house Koffler & Co. and has named Steven Koffler its first outside managing director in nearly 20 years.
Koffler ran his own firm for nearly a decade. One of his largest deals was the sale of weight loss company Jenny Craig. More recently he sold Jackson Hole Realty to Sotheby’s International Realty last year.
Koffler previously worked as a managing director and co-head of the Western region for Smith Barney and has held senior positions at Sutro & Co. and Merrill Lynch & Co.
For the past few years, the mergers and acquisitions market was ailing, but it shows signs of coming back to life.
“I think it’s getting better,” Koffler said. “There have been a bunch of entrepreneurs in Southern California that have sat on their businesses for a couple of years because it was a shock to go from the days of the late 1990s to prices just dropping. Now the market is moving up again.”
Kate Berry
Chipmaker Expands Market
Broadcom Corp. is taking another step into storage.
A year ago, the Irvine-based chipmaker bought the assets of Santa Clara’s Gadzoox Networks Inc. out of bankruptcy for nearly $9 million, a far cry from the storage network switch maker’s $2 billion market value in 1999.
Add to that Broadcom’s $16.5 million buy of Nashua, N.H.-based RAIDCore Inc. earlier this month, a move that further plants the company in the storage market. RAIDCore makes software to manage large banks of drives used to store databases.
Now comes Broadcom’s $18 million buy of storage technology patents from Austin, Texas-based Cirrus Logic Inc. The patents, acquired Feb. 11, cover the way data is stored and retrieved from disk drives.
Broadcom, which recently settled a three-year court battle with Intel Corp. over patents, is eager to build up its own design holdings as a defensive strategy. That was a deciding factor in the buy of the Cirrus patents.
“We feel there is a lot of value there,” said T. Peter Andrew, Broadcom’s senior director of investor relations. “We want to protect Broadcom from future litigation. It’s good to have a bigger patent portfolio should we decide to get into this area.”
Orange County Business Journal
