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Sony is the biggest of all when it comes to market capitalization
Sunday, April 09, 2000 By Steve Massey, Associate Editor/Business
It may seem odd that a Japanese firm would top the Post-Gazette's list of the region's most valuable companies -- this, after all, is Pittsburgh, not Tokyo.
But in choosing the candidates for its annual performance review of the region's public companies, the PG decided it would be unfair to overlook companies with sizable local operations just because their headquarters aren't here.
It's a standard that the electronics behemoth that brought us Walkmans, PlayStations and "Men in Black" easily meets. Since being wooed a decade ago to build televisions at the site of an abandoned Volkswagen plant in Westmoreland County, Sony's Pittsburgh Technology Center complex has grown to employ some 3,500.
The facilities, which include a glass-making joint venture and a bar-coding products plant, last year pumped out their millionth rear-projection set.
And employment growth at the site has been a major force behind a small resurgence in the region's manufacturing payrolls.
Moreover, Sony has become part of the local establishment. It is among a handful of companies, along with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State University, backing a regional effort to make Pittsburgh a leader in microchip design. Sony's chairman, Norio Ohga, even recently served as a guest conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
All that may not matter to local teenagers (and some of their parents) more concerned with how well Sony's newly released PlayStation2 performs. But then again, local teens (and many of their parents) probably aren't very familiar with the phrase market capitalization anyway.
By the book, market cap measures the value of a company based on its stock price multiplied by its outstanding shares -- essentially the value investors have put on the enterprise.
And by that measure, Sony was last year's runaway local winner, with a market cap of $116.9 billion, nearly $20 billion higher than No. 2 Bell Atlantic and almost four times higher than No. 3 Alcoa.
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