Movin' on up

When the predawn stillness of the Los Angeles basin was shattered by a massive earthquake on January 17, 1994, Packard Bell Electronics Inc.'s manufacturing and headquarters facility, only a few miles from the epicenter, took a major hit. Luckily, the night shift on the personal computer maker's assembly line had just ended and 320 workers left the building minutes before crashing debris would cause the closing of the site. The same fortunate timing that precluded serious injuries and the persistence that would quickly get Packard Bell up and running again elsewhere seem typical of a firm that has become the third biggest personal computer maker in the United States (number one in desktop models). Yet Packard Bell remains an enigma within a high-visibility industry.

Founded in its current incarnation in 1986 and still privately held, Packard Bell has managed to outsell such powerhouses as IBM Corp. and such innovators as AST Research Inc., trailing only Compaq Computer Corp. and Apple Computer Inc. in personal computer sales in the U.S. in 1994, all the while maintaining an extremely low profile. Though Packard Bell was the most advertised computer brand at retail last year thanks to co-op ads, the company has yet to spend a dime on national image advertising--a virtually unheard of policy in the computer business. And even as it has become well known to retailers and analysts, Packard Bell has garnered only a few short articles in the national business press.

On the morning of the earthquake, after reassuring himself that his wife and children were safe, and unable to reach Packard Bell by phone, President and CEO Beny Alagem drove through devastated side streets to company headquarters in Chatsworth. "I was there by about 6:30 and all the other executives were there by 8 o'clock," Alagem recalls nearly a year later. "There were people with major damage to their homes and they still showed up." Within hours the entire firm's management and support staff, wearing yellow hard hats and braving aftershocks, was mobilized at folding tables in the parking lot, phoning customers and suppliers to reassure them that Packard Bell was alive and kicking.

The company was fortunate in restoring communications while phone service all around was still down; sharing office space...