basachs, on Apr 4 2006, 05:57 PM, said:
With the latest Fortune magazines biggest companies list out for 2006, I was curious how many of these/who were in RI. There were a couple I forgot about (FM Global, Nortek).
In addition to these companies RI is home to an odd density of large subsidiary business units (Citizens, Brooks, GTECH), back office operations or plants (Fidelity, Amgen) and private companies (Gilbane). However, several of the Fortune 1000 run mainly corporate functions from here - CVS, Textron.
The disturbing trend is that several of these companies - Fleet, GTECH, and Citizens, for example - are becoming business units of major multinationals. By itself this isn't necessarily a problem, but the replacement rate of these big independent organizations is very low. Most successful RI fast growth companies are either being snapped up in acquisitions (Ibis Consulting) or moving out of town at inflection points (RenaMed, Spherics).