by Jessica Sabbath
Virginia Business
March 2006 Sometimes, a year
can make a world of difference. For some companies
listed in this year’s
List of Leaders, that year was 2005.
Take Freddie Mac, the McLean-based
mortgage finance company that’s dominated the
public companies list for years, but landed at spot
23 this year. Or
note the leap
by Sprint Nextel Corp. to the top of the list, boosted
by a $36 billion merger between two large telecommunications
companies.
Public companies are one of
17 sectors ranked in this year’s List of Leaders, Virginia Business’ annual
listing of Virginia’s largest companies. Each year
the lists show who’s climbed, who’s slipped
and who’s fallen off entirely.
Freddie Mac dropped significantly
in this year’s
rankings, due to current volatile market forces and a
new Virginia Business method of calculating the company’s
revenue. The company does not report its total revenue.
Nextel Communications ranked fourth on the list in 2004
with $12.8 billion in revenue and a net income of $3.1
billion. But after finding a powerful partner in Sprint,
the newly merged company easily topped our public companies
list with $43.3 billion in revenue.
Last year also brought change for Waynesboro-based nTELOS,
a publicly traded telecommunications company that was
acquired by two private firms in 2005 and has now re-emerged
in the market as NTELOS Holdings Corp. The company began
trading 14.4 million shares during an initial public
offering in February.
Sprint and Nextel weren’t the only companies to
pair up last year. Two Virginia law firms expanded their
reach significantly by merging with larger firms. Washington,
D.C. based-Shaw Pittman, which already ranked seventh
on the list, joined San Francisco-based Pillsbury Winthrop.
Also, Alexandria-based Burns, Doane, Swecker & Mathis
joined Pittsburgh-based commercial law firm Buchanan
Ingersoll in June. Those mergers, however, didn’t
boost the companies’ rankings on the list, which
highlights the number of Virginia lawyers at each firm.
For some companies, change in 2005 meant dropping off
the lists completely.
Riggs National moved off the
banks and thrifts list after being acquired this
year by PNC Financial Services.
The
Mark Winkler Co., with a middle-of-the-pack ranking
in recent years in commercial real estate, recently
announced
the sale of its real estate portfolio for $2.3 billion.
Hecht’s department stores dropped from the divisions
and subsidiaries list after Federated Department Stores
Inc. acquired its parent company, May Department Stores,
last year and merged Hecht’s with Macy’s.
But change didn’t dominate
all sectors. Many companies merely hung on to the
status quo, with their
rankings
within sectors changing little. For instance, the credit
union list barely budged, other than to show a general
increase in assets.
In this year’s look at the leaders, Virginia Business
paid special attention to business done in Virginia.
In some sectors, the volume of business done in the Old
Dominion — as opposed to a company’s total
revenues — determined the ranking. That’s
why there are significant drops for some firms, especially
on the architectural and engineering firms list.
What will 2006 bring? Perhaps
next year’s lists
will show Virginia companies continuing to look for beneficial
financial partners. Maybe we’ll see some more newcomers.
Perhaps the No. 1 spot on the public companies list will
be up for grabs. But for now, we hope readers enjoy this
overview on how the commonwealth’s largest companies
fared in 2005.
