Acxiom Corp. has signed a five-year lease on two floors of a building at 301 Main St. in Little Rock, about two weeks after announcing the sale of its 12-story tower building in the city.
Acxiom has shed 90 employees globally since announcing the sale of the building March 10, according to numbers provided by the company Thursday.
At the time of the sale announcement, the Conway company clarified that "a small number" of its Little Rock staff would remain in Little Rock at a yet-to-be-determined location. It also said the rest of its Little Rock employees would remain with the company and work either in the Conway offices or from home.
"As the company enters a new fiscal year, business plans sometimes result in staffing adjustments," Acxiom spokesman Sherry Hamilton said in response to a question about layoffs.
While she declined to quantify the number of employees in Arkansas affected by the "adjustments," she said the impact is "limited in nature." The total global employee head count is now 3,256, compared with 3,346 on March 10.
The Little Rock tower had 174,000 square feet of office space. Fewer than 15 legal and privacy department employees will occupy about 11,200 square feet at the new address in the city's Creative Corridor. Todd Rice and Mason Lewis with Colliers International in Arkansas facilitated the lease on behalf of the owner, Terraforma LLC.
Jerry Jones, Acxiom's chief ethics and legal officer, executive vice president and assistant secretary, manages the legal and privacy teams that will move into the space. He said that unlike many of the other engineering employees in the Little Rock tower, his staff is "a contained unit" and "there was not as compelling a reason for my two teams to work in Conway."
"We wanted to maintain a Little Rock presence, as well," he said of the new office space. "I have spent my entire career working within a half-mile radius of downtown Little Rock. It's dynamic. The space that we're moving into is going to be an exciting place for our people."
The Conway company helps marketers more efficiently target their consumers through digital marketing technology, and data management and collection services. It has been gradually shrinking its global footprint since a peak of more than 7,000 employees in 2007.
At that time, about 2,700 people worked for the company in Arkansas, where it was founded in 1969. In 2013 that number hovered around 2,250, and today, the company reports about 1,500 employees in its home state.
"I feel like Acxiom has moved with their CEO and executive team mostly to California now," Charles Morgan, former leader of Acxiom, said in an interview earlier this month. "They have mostly abandoned us here, which I think was a mistake."
The company is a "shadow of its former self, that's for sure," he said.
"The fact of the matter is their revenue is still less than it was when I left the company," he said. "They've struggled to find their way, and it's too bad because they've still got some great assets."
Acxiom's revenue has not fully recovered since a decline that began around 2007 when a planned buyout deal collapsed. The offer, which would have taken the company private, was to be for $3 billion.
Today, Acxiom's market capitalization, the estimated value of a company based on number of shares and share value, is $2.2 billion. For fiscal 2007, it had around $1.4 billion in annual revenue. In fiscal 2016, it reported $850 million in revenue.
Business on 03/31/2017