Bovie closes Melville headquarters to move to Westchester
A Google street view of the former Bovie Medical headquarters at 734 Walt Whitman Rd. in Melville. Credit: AP
Bovie Medical Corp., a small public company, has quietly closed its Melville headquarters and plans to open a larger office in Westchester County -- near where its top executives live, an official confirmed Tuesday.
Bovie is the latest public company to move its corporate office off Long Island. About two dozen once-local businesses with stock traded on major exchanges have transferred their headquarters elsewhere, shut down or been acquired since 2007.
Where the CEO lives was a key factor in some instances. In 2011, Arrow Electronics Inc., then the Island's largest public company, moved its executive office from Melville to Denver, where CEO Michael J. Long had lived for years.
Bovie manufactures electrosurgical devices. It reported a loss of $4.3 million last year on sales of $24 million. Late in 2013, the company received a $7 million cash infusion from the investment firm Great Point Partners LLC of Greenwich and agreed to appoint health care industry veteran Robert L. Gershon as CEO.
Gershon was a senior sales and marketing executive at Covidien and Henry Schein, which also has its corporate office in Melville.
"With a new CEO in place, Bovie Medical is working to establish a small office in an optimal location for the company to continue conducting its executive business," said Bovie spokesman Farrell Kramer. "The executive office, previously located in Melville, N.Y., is now closed. . . . We will disclose further information on the new executive office as soon as it is available."
Only a handful of people worked in Bovie's Melville office.
Kramer said that headquarters work has been done temporarily at Bovie's factory in Clearwater, Fla., since mid-February while the new corporate office is being prepared in the Westchester hamlet of Purchase. That facility is 3,650 square feet, considerably larger than the former office at 734 Walt Whitman Rd. in Melville.
Bovie first disclosed its change of headquarters in a securities filing last month. Spokesmen for the Suffolk County Industrial Development Agency and Empire State Development, New York's primary business aid agency, weren't immediately available to comment Tuesday.
Bovie was Long Island's 43rd largest public company based on sales.
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