RANK PREVIOUS COMPANY
1
1
Maui Electric Co.
2
2
Tesoro Hawai`i
3
3
Maui Land & Pineapple Co.
4
4
Weinberg Foundation
5
6
Makena Resort
6
7
Dowling Co.
7
5 Alexander & Baldwin
8
8
Wailuku Water Co.
9
9
Monsanto Hawai`i
10
10
Hawaiian Telcom
BRANDED!
A&B drops a couple notches on the news that it hired Venture magazine publisher Kevin Halloran as a director for corporate finance and investor relations. According to an Oct. 12 Pacific Business News
story, the owner of Matson Navigation, A&B Properties, Kauai Coffee
and Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar likes Halloran’s “unique blend of
investment banking and corporate development experience,” which is
doubletalk for the fact that Halloran knows all about “branding”—a huge
deal with corporations worried that they’re becoming passe or
unpopular. “Your brand is your promise to customers,” Halloran told PBN
back in 2002, when he was also running the Honolulu consultant firm
Media Venture Partners. Guess A&B figures that today’s youth just
aren’t hip to the company’s sprawling land holdings, ocean-going
freighters and odorous sugar refineries. Then again, Halloran does have
good timing: he left Media Venture Partners in 2004, which is also the
same year state records show the company stopped filing annual reports
to the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, which now considers
the firm “not in good standing.”
DISCONNECTED?
Carlyle Group-owned Hawaiian Telcom is very lucky this week—it’s
already at the bottom of the list, and can’t drop any lower, even
though on Oct. 10 Pacific Business News
reported that the company is fielding so many customer complaints that
they’ve had to use a professional call center located on the Mainland.
You’d think that Carlyle Group—one of the world’s largest private
equity firms, managing more than $14 billion worth of investments,
properties and other companies—would be able to run a little phone
company in the little state of Hawai`i without having to call for help
when so many of their customers start calling them for help, but I
guess you’d be wrong. MTW
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