Toshiba Leads Foreign-Owned Job Gain, Experian Challenges

Orange County Business Journal, Jan 29-Feb 4, 2007 by Tolkoff, Sarah

A hiring surge helped Japan's Toshiba Corp, hold its spot as the largest foreign-owned company in Orange County amid a challenge by Europe's Experian Group Ltd.

That's according to week's Business Journal list, which ranks foreignowned companies here by local workers.

Toshiba led an overall 7% gain to 25,694 workers at the 40 largest foreign-owned companies here in the past year.

The company, which has North American headquarters for four of its businesses here, saw an estimated 17% increase to 1,562 local workers.

Last year at this time, Toshiba cut 16% of its local workers.

Irvine-based Toshiba America Information Systems Inc., a maker of portable computers and other products, saw hiring on higher sales, said Chris Harrington, vice president of strategy and business development for the unit.

"We are seeing a big transition of people who are buying computers in notebook form," he said. "People want to carry their computers with them."

Toshiba also got a boost from Internet phone products and storage devices for videos, photos and music. Harrington said.

"These are some of the things happening in the U.S. market in general." he said. "We have products that play into all of those trends."

No. 2 Experian Group, a financial services and credit reporting company, only is 62 workers behind Toshiba.

Experian, whose formal headquarters is in Dublin, Ireland (see story, page 1). grew its local workforce by 1% to about 1,500 people in the past year.

Most are at the company's Americas headquarters in Costa Mesa.

Experian Interactive, which includes the company's Internet-based businesses, has an Irvine unit.

"We have been growing at a double-digit rate in North America, in pan because our strategy is to continue to do new product development," said Peg Smith, an Experian executive vice president in London.

Japanese companies long have dominated our foreign-owned list. They've slipped in number as the list has grown more diverse.

Newcomers this year hail from Iceland, Singapore and the Netherlands.

The number of Japanese companies this year is 13, down from 15 a year ago.

Four of the top 10 companies are from Japan, reflecting the county's role as a hub for Japanese electronics, auto and other companies.

In all. there are 17 busines'ses from Asia and 20 from Europe.

Britain leads among European countries with six entries. Germany has four, France has five.

The Middle East counts more entries this year with parent companies in Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

This year's list includes a handful of additions, some the result of buyouts and acquisitions.

One of the biggest newcomers is No. 19 Iceland's Ossur HF, a maker of braces, supports and prosthetics for amputees.

The company has its North American headquarters is in Aliso Viejo.

Last year, Ossur bought Innovation Sports Inc., a Foothill Ranch maker of knee braces, for $38 million.

The company has about 588 local workers in South County, up 156% from a year earlier on the Innovation acquisition.

The biggest job cuts came from No. 27 Singapore-based WBL Corp., which owns the majority of Anaheim's Multi-Fineline Electronix Inc., a circuit board maker.

Multi-Fineline is down 20% to 398 local workers.

The company, known as M-Flex. makes flexible circuit boards. In the past year, it saw profits fall with a slowdown in sales to dominant customer Motorola Inc.

No. 26 Irvine-based Bax Global Inc., a logistics company that's part of Germany's Deutsche Bahn AG, grew local employment..-, 10% to 414 people this year.

Last year, Deutsche Bahn paid about $1 billion to buy Bax from Virginia-based Brink's Co. Bax now is part of Deutsche Bahn's Schenker AG unit.

Joining Deutsche Bahn has fueled business at Bax, spokeswoman Marie Connell said.

"It's less than a handful of customers that actually overlapped," she said. "Both companies gained a tremendous amount of customers."

Bax, which also has a Garden Grove warehouse, does heavy and oversized shipments, such as helicopter blades. It also does massive product rollouts to stores. Bax arranged a big airlift to deliver Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360 to retailers last year.