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The Year in Review: Hawaii Based Companies

Perpetual Tourist / Flickr
Perpetual Tourist / Flickr

There aren’t many publicly traded companies headquartered in Hawaii – just 16, since Maui-based Code Rebel recently went public. Overall, how are they performing? Pacific Business News Editor in Chief A. Kam Napier has more.

As recently as the 1990s, stockbroker Randy Havre offered a Hawaii fund, that is a portfolio of stocks, through which people could invest in all of Hawaii’s publicly traded companies. He no longer offers that fund. Due to mergers and acquisitions, the number of companies has shrunk to just 16.

This week, we took a look at the stock performance of all 16 over the past year, to see how they measure up. By and large, if you were to assemble your own Hawaii fund, you’d be a satisfied investor; if you had a basket of just one share form each company, for example, your basket would be worth about $43 more dollars today than it was a year ago.

As often the case, however, this performance is not spread evenly. We found that, generally, the bigger the company, the better it was doing. Bank of Hawaii was worth $58.478 a share at this time last year. That’s now $66.62. Matson is up from about $25 to nearly $43. Hawaiian Airlines: up from $14 to nearly $25 – yes, baggage fees have been very good to Hawaiian Airlines. Meanwhile, smaller companies have been more likely to see small declines: Royal Hawaiian Orchards went from $3.15 to $2.82, Kona Red Corporation dropped from 57 cents a share to thirteen cents.

A. Kam Napier is the editor-in-chief of Pacific Business News.
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