Fortune 500 list has one Long Island company: Henry Schein

Henry Schein Inc. is Long Island’s lone representative on the list of Fortune 500 companies released Wednesday.

The health care products distributor has been in the Fortune 500 since 2004 when it debuted at No. 487. But the new list is the first in at least the past 10 years that listed only one Long Island company.

The Melville multinational moved up 25 slots to No. 243 from the prior year’s list.

Fortune 500 companies are ranked based on their total revenue for their fiscal years, and Henry Schein’s $11.6 billion is about four times that of Long Island’s second largest public company, shareholder report processor Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc., whose ranking at No. 749 put it outside the 500.

Last year, Henry Schein was joined on the list by Cablevision Systems Corp., at No. 419. Cablevision, which owned Newsday, was acquired, after the ranking came out, by European telecom giant Altice NV, which retains a 25 percent stake in Newsday.

Altice USA, the Bethpage-based U.S. unit of Altice NV, filed a prospectus in April to go public. That filing listed 2016 pro forma revenue of $9.2 billion, which would put the company well above this year’s cutoff of $5.15 billion.

CA Technologies, which retains substantial operations in Islandia after moving its headquarters to Manhattan in 2014, ranked No. 583. Manhattan-based cosmetics company Estée Lauder, which has operations in Melville, ranked No. 253.

In November 2011, Long Island’s largest company by revenue at that time, Arrow Electronics Inc., a Melville electronics distributor, moved its corporate headquarters to Englewood, Colorado. That was one of several relocations and acquisitions that stripped Long Island of some of its largest public companies, including Grumman, Pall, and Symbol Technologies.

Long Island, however, also is the home of New Hyde Park-based Northwell Health, a nonprofit hospital system with $8.7 billion in revenue in 2015. Northwell isn’t on the Fortune 500 because it is not a public company.

Mitchell Goldberg, president of ClientFirst Strategy Inc., a Melville investment advisory firm, said Long Island’s aging population, heavy tax burden and high cost of living are giving corporations pause.

“Companies would be hesitant to place major operations here,” he said. “This has been a trend on Long Island for years.”

This year’s top 10 Fortune 500 companies are: Walmart, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Exxon Mobil, McKesson, United Health Group, CVS Health, General Motors, AT&T, and Ford Motor.

The 10 most profitable Fortune 500 companies are dominated by technology and financial services enterprises: Apple, J.P. Morgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway, Wells Fargo, Alphabet (the corporate parent of Google), Bank of America, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Citigroup, and Altria Group.

By Ken Schachter

kenneth.schachter@newsday.comkschach

Ken Schachter covers corporate news, including technology and aerospace, and other business topics for Newsday. He has also worked at The Miami Herald and The Jerusalem Post.