If you root for L.A. businesses, you had to be a little discouraged to see Barron’s list of America’s Best Companies. Not only were there no local companies in the top 10, there were no local companies in the top 20 or 30 or even 50.
Barron’s grades the biggest companies’ sales growth, cash flow and return to stockholders over a year, and then each company is ranked 1 through 500. It’s a pretty good annual report card of how the mighty have fared in the last year.
The highest-ranked local business was Jacobs Engineering Group, which came in at No. 61. It was up 44 spots from last year. CB Richard Ellis Group was No. 81; it was not ranked last year. That’s the good news. And that’s about the end of it.
Other local businesses (and only a handful are on the list) were further down the rankings and most swooned from last year. DaVita Inc. slid 99 places to land at No. 163. HealthNet fell 155 places to No. 189. The Walt Disney Co. skidded 97 positions to land at No. 226.
The biggest fall was sustained by Amgen, which plunged 272 positions from last year. It was ranked No. 400. Also ranked down in the 400s: Countrywide Financial was No. 463, down 139 spots, and KB Home was No. 489, down 101. Those last three were not a surprise, given the brutal years in their industries.
Still, it’s startling to see a statistical measure showing how far so many of our local companies fell in the last year, particularly when put on a bell curve with their peers. If this were a baseball team and the local companies were players, we’d be the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Oh, well. As they say in baseball: maybe next year.
– – –
A few months ago, I opined that the “crisis” of the looming tsunami of baby boomer retirements was a crock. Lots of consultants are trying to sell services to businesses to help them through a problem that may not materialize.
I am a baby boomer, and I know very few of my peers who are even thinking about retirement. I’ve heard a few express fear that they’ll be forced to retire. Most want to labor on past the traditional retirement age, either because they need to financially or because they just want to.
My rationale was merely anecdotal. So I was interested to see more of a scientific look at the issue by the Coyne Partnership of Atlanta. In a report, it said that the size and the growth of the retirement market “will be much smaller than is widely believed.”
The findings were reported in the May 26 issue of BusinessWeek. (Headline: “That Wave of Retirees? Not So Big.”) For several financial and social reasons (more divorced people, fewer pensions, having children later in life), the report said people simply aren’t retiring on time or early. The number of retirees will grow less than 3 percent a year, on par with population growth, over the coming decades, and it could fall as low as 1 percent.
In the first four months of this year, about 30 percent of people ages 65 to 69 were either employed or looking for work, up sharply from 24 percent in 2000.
I repeat: Businesses will have less of a headache dealing with boomer retirements and more of a headache getting them out of the workplace.
Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at
[email protected]
.
