RANK   PREVIOUS   COMPANY



  

1             

1            

Dowling Co.

  

2             

2            

Maui Land & Pineapple Co.

  

3             

4            

Alexander & Baldwin



  

4             

3            

Weinberg Foundation

  

5             

5            

Tesoro Hawai`i

  

6             

6            

Goodfellow Brothers

  

7             

7            

Maui Electric Co.

  

8             

8            

Monsanto Hawai`i

  

9            

10            Hawaiian Telcom



 

10            

9            

Wailuku Water Co.





SWEETNESS



A&B has a sweet plan that will boost two of its divisions, reports the Mar. 22 Maui News.

Now get ready, folks—this is a really complex, risky proposal: Hawaiian

Commercial & Sugar (HC&S), which is a wholly owned subsidiary

of A&B, is going to double its "specialty" sugar production. Are

you shocked? I'm shocked. They're going to go from making 25,000 tons

of their elitist, snobby high-end sugar to 50,000 tons. Think of all

that money! Think of all that tooth decay! But this is a double whammy

for A&B because they're going to be putting all that new specialty

sugar into containers and then placing those containers on Matson

Navigation ships that are also owned by A&B! (And I thought they'd

just bulldozer a mound of the stuff onto the deck of a freighter and

sail away—shows what I know about sugar production). "The specialty

sugar will be filling containers that Matson would otherwise be

back-hauling empty," states The Maui News article. See—everybody's happy!

NO MORE INFO



And poor, poor Hawaiian Telcom moves up a notch on news that it's

closing its directory assistance shop and farming the work out to a

subcontractor. I mean, this is good news, right? The company that can't

get its billing and public service divisions in order even though it's

owned by the Carlyle Group—one of the world's richest private equity

firms is now hacking off a limb no one really said was diseased,

putting 36 people out of work, according to a Mar. 22 posting on the Pacific Business News

website. Isn't this what big firms do all the time to get profitable?

Cut costs? Lay off workers? Things are going to get better, right? MTW