The Times 100 : The Best Performing Companies in California : THE GIANTS : High-Tech Firm Headed for Record : Conner Peripherals could become the fastest-growing U.S. company because of its customized approach to disk drive design.
Finis F. Conner’s mother was a silent-movie buff who wanted to make a statement when she named her fifth--and final--son.
But Conner himself ends up being more fond of beginnings than endings.
At 46, Conner has helped launch three major disk drive companies--Shugart Associates; Seagate Technology, the struggling industry leader, and, in 1986, Conner Peripherals. At its current pace, Conner Peripherals, based in San Jose, will surpass $1 billion in sales by year-end to become the fastest-growing company in U.S. history.
Behind the surging growth is a deceptively simple strategy.
“Our plan is to identify customer needs sooner and fill them faster than the competition,” said Chairman and Chief Executive Conner, whose first name is pronounced FINE-iss, like that of an evangelist who often preached near the family’s home town of Gadsden, Ala.
To eliminate much of the risk associated with the volatile business of making disk drives--data storage devices used in computers--Conner Peripherals eschews the usual approach to product development: develop, build, find a buyer.
Instead, the company works with customers to design components, then manufactures enough to fill an order.
The ability to do “creative and accurate planning,” Conner said, has “allowed us to grow the company at this rate.”
In 1989, Conner Peripherals’ sales soared 175% to $704.9 million, pushing it into the 87th slot on The Sales 100 list. For 1990, the Hambrecht & Quist research firm in San Francisco forecasts further growth of 70%, to $1.2 billion. Profits, meanwhile, are expected to more than double, to $90 million from $41 million last year, according to Todd D. Bakar, a technology analyst at Hambrecht & Quist.
“It’s the kind of company you wish more American business could resemble,” with a strong, experienced management team, said James Porter, president of Disk/Trend Inc., a market research firm in Mountain View. About the only note of caution being injected by analysts these days is concern that Conner Peripherals might stumble because of its torrid growth.
One of the company’s savviest decisions was to focus on production of 3 1/2-inch Winchester disk drives for laptop, notebook and other new-generation computers when the rest of the industry stuck with the bulkier 5 1/4-inch drives. The technical brain behind the smaller drives is co-founder John Squires, who heads a research and development staff in Longmont, Colo.
Compaq Computer Corp. of Houston, which provided the start-up money for Conner Peripherals, is also its biggest customer, accounting for slightly less than 30% of sales. Conner Peripherals is the dominant supplier to such Japanese giants as Toshiba, Sharp and NEC.
Finis Conner, whose late father was a carpenter, is an all-American business success story. As a “happy-go-lucky kid,” he lived in Alabama, Texas and Florida. At 18, he boarded a train for California and landed in San Jose, where he found a job with IBM as an engineering clerk-typist. He put himself through school at San Jose State University, graduating with a business degree in industrial management.
Having made two fortunes already, he now commutes daily by plane from his home in Pebble Beach. A while ago, he sold his 95-foot yacht because he “wasn’t using it that much anymore.”
A low-handicap golfer, Conner said he hopes to be “in a position by the time I reach 50” to retire if he chooses. But Conner obviously does not intend for there to be a “finis” to Conner Peripherals any time soon. The annual report features a photo of the Great Pyramids and the notice to any doubters: “Our goal is to build a company that will withstand the test of time.”
