Another win in Paris for Pierre André Senizergues

It’s been a good ride of late for the skateboarding industry, and for Orange County sponsors of the sport.

20-year-old Jagger Eaton earned a bronze medal at the recently completed 2020 Tokyo Olympics, in the men’s street category; he’s sponsored by The Heart Supply, the Tustin-based upstart skate company that’s headed by Johnny Schillereff, the Velcro Valley vet who founded and previously led Boardriders unit Element Skateboards.

Heart Supply, which recently landed a major distribution deal with Target, was profiled in the July 19 print edition of the Business Journal.

Last month saw Huntington Beach resident and Etnies-sponsored skater Trevor McClung win the Red Bull Paris Conquest contest in France; Etnies is a unit of Lake Forest’s Sole Technology Inc., the long-running action sports apparel and footwear maker.

See Kari Hamanaka’s front-page feature on Sole founder and CEO Pierre André Senizergues’ plans for promoting the sport he loves at future Olympic Games.

“What’s even more extraordinary, [McClung had] never done any contest, so it was really unexpected,” Senizergues told Hamanaka of his skater winning the competition, which took place not far from the Eiffel Tower.

It wasn’t the only big win for Senizergues during the trip.

McClung “came to France to enter the contest and, on top of that, I got him to try escargots,” he said.

The secret: “You can eat anything. It’s all about the sauce.”

San Clemente’s ICU Medical (Nasdaq: ICUI) ranks as OC’s 17th-largest medical device maker by local employee count; it’s also among the most lowkey, with news about its IV pumps and other critical care products a rarity despite counting a market cap around $4 billion coming into September.

It made up for lost time last week, announcing a $2.35 billion deal to buy the medical division of the U.K.’s Smiths Group PLC. The division includes syringe and ambulatory infusion devices, vascular access, and vital care products.

Unlike most acquisition deals where the buyer’s stock takes a hit, ICU Medical shares soared 26% to a $5.5 billion valuation on the day of the announcement, an indication that Wall Street loved the deal.

See this week’s Biomed and Biotech Special Report (starting on page 15) for more on the area’s growing medical device industry, and page 9 for a different $2 billion acquisition in the cards, for Newport Beach’s Pimco.

What company’s been on the cover of the Business Journal more than any other the past five years? Possibly Newport Beach’s Lugano Diamonds, if you count the jewelry ads that often adorn the front of our editions, including this one.

Lugano is a longtime sponsor of our Women in Business Awards event; see page 33 for more on this year’s crop of nominees. The event takes place Oct. 28.

This week is a first with a page 1 photo of the jeweler’s co-founder and CEO Moti Ferder on it, following the company’s deal with Compass Diversified, which counts a local office in Irvine. The enterprise value of the deal, announced Sept. 7, is cited at $256 million.

For the record, the Lugano story and ad aren’t an exercise in synergy; cover ads are finalized weeks in advance, well before the Compass deal was announced.