Do you remember AccuStaff? Or American Heritage Life? Or Barnett Banks?
These were three of the most significant Jacksonville companies in the 1990s, and all three occupied signature buildings on the Downtown skyline.
But all three are gone now, having long since been swallowed up by larger competitors.
I recently found myself looking at a story I wrote 15 years ago about the stock performance of Jacksonville-based public companies. There were 30 companies on the list for that story and to my surprise, I realized that most of them are no longer with us.
Many were acquired, but some just went out of business. Remember Orthodontic Centers of America, a hot IPO of the 1990s that went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy a decade later?
In fact, only five of those 30 stocks are still trading today under the same name and one of those, FPIC Insurance Group Inc., will soon disappear due to a merger with a competitor.
The landscape of local companies is constantly changing. But at least it’s never dull, as I well know.
I have been writing about Jacksonville companies and their stocks in The Florida Times-Union for more than 20 years and, starting today, I’ll be writing about them for the Daily Record.
I expect to have a lot to write about. Jacksonville is home to four Fortune 500 companies, none of which were on that 1996 list of 30 stocks.
CSX Corp. had a good part of its railroad operations here but the corporate office was in Virginia back then.
Winn-Dixie Stores Inc. has been based in Jacksonville for decades but after a Chapter 11 filing in 2005, its old stock was cancelled. The Winn-Dixie stock that currently exists is new stock that was originally issued to creditors after the supermarket chain emerged from bankruptcy in 2006.
The other two Fortune 500 firms, Fidelity National Financial Inc. and its spinoff, Fidelity National Information Services Inc., moved their operations to Jacksonville from California in 2003.
The four companies that have continued on in Jacksonville for more than 15 years were all stocks that had initial public offerings during the market boom of the 1990s and have managed to weather various economic and market booms and busts since then.
That includes Stein Mart Inc., Regency Centers Corp. and PSS World Medical Inc., three companies that have grown into stalwarts of the Jacksonville business community.
The other company is ParkerVision Inc., which has remarkably managed to stay around despite not turning a profit in more than two decades of business. The company has been developing wireless radio technology and continues to attract some investor interest with the promise of technological breakthroughs. And I’ve been watching it every step of the way.
The list of Jacksonville stocks continues to change. Just in the past year, we’ve seen IPOs from clothing retailer Body Central Corp. and insurance services firm Fortegra Financial Corp.
EverBank Financial Corp. has also filed for an IPO, but the uncertainty of the markets has seemed to put that stock sale on hold. So the banking company remains private for now.
Currently, I’m following 23 companies headquartered in the Jacksonville area that trade regularly in the markets. I’m also following some companies that trade very sporadically and you may not have heard of, like American Restaurant Concepts Inc., the franchisor of Dick’s Wings restaurants.
I also keep tabs on companies that are not headquartered in Northeast Florida but are major employers in the local economy, like Convergys Corp., Medtronic Inc. and Northrop Grumman Corp. And of course, all of the big banks that are in the Jacksonville market.
So stay tuned. Hopefully I’ll have a lot more to tell you about in the coming weeks and months.