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