Olin Berry King, founder, and chairman of SCI Systems, Inc. of Huntsville, has already decided on his epitaph: “You always knew where he stood.” Where King and his company stand, for starters, is at the top of the contract electronics manufacturing business.
SCI Systems, Inc., with 6,000 employees in Huntsville, is the city’s largest private employer and the state’s largest company. The company also has 37 plants in 17 countries and has 31,500 employees worldwide. The company had sales of more than $8 billion for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2000.
King started his business in 1961 in the basement of his south Huntsville home. He and two partners pooled their money – $21,000 – and formed Space Craft, Inc., and set out to design and build satellites. The company quickly became a major subcontractor, building components and instrumentation for NASA’s Saturn V rocket, the vehicle that launched man to the moon.
In the Vietnam War era, SCI made subsystems for military aircraft, then applied that experience to commercial aircraft. In 1976 SCI began making computer terminals for IBM. The big break came in 1981 when SCI began to make personal computers for IBM. Company sales rocketed from $46 million to $500 million by 1985.
SCI, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, is today an $8 billion company that builds electronic products for companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co., and Nostel, as well as several hundred companies involved in the telecommunications, computer, medical, and defense industries.
King built SCI based on the principles of competitive cost, quality, reliability, and responsiveness. And with the daily advances in high tech, many people think the best days are yet ahead for SCI, called by Forbes magazine the “Kmart of the electronic industry.”
King is the son of George Olin King, a Methodist minister, and Elizabeth Berry King. He was born March 17, 1934, in Sandersville, Ga., in the state’s peanut growing region, but he and his family moved with his father’s ministry.
He eventually enrolled at North Georgia College in Dahlonega to study physics and mathematics, graduating at 19. Following his graduation, he spent two years of active duty; during the Korean War, he was a Signal Corps officer. He also took additional courses in engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University. He worked briefly as a design engineer at RCA, then moved to a position with the Army’s ballistic missile program, arriving in Huntsville in 1957. He spent the years between 1957 and 1961 helping build satellites and missiles with Werner von Braun. And then, at age 26, he went from engineer to entrepreneur, teaming with two partners to start Space Craft, Inc.
A key reason for SCI’s astounding success has been its flexibility. One of the firm’s first projects was a satellite for Johns Hopkins University. But the attention of the public and the government soon turned from satellites to scientific manned space programs and King and company began building electronic systems for the Saturn V rocket and other NASA and military missile projects.
When the space projects began to fade, King put the company to work building cockpit controls and other electronic systems for military aircraft.
In the mid-1970s, several large companies such as Hewlett Packard and IBM began looking for answers to the highly competitive challenge of manufacturing electronic products. One answer was to contract with firms such as SCI to build the external equipment the companies designed. The company turned heads across the world when IBM chose it as the primary manufacturer for its original personal computer. The electronic products manufacturing business has mushroomed in the past two decades and shows no indication of slowing.
To meet the growing demand for electronic components and products, King and SCI embarked on an expanded growth program. It has more than six million square feet of manufacturing space in 17 countries across Europe, the North Americas, and Asia and has other facilities under construction.
In 1968, King married his wife, Shelbie, with whom he has raised four children – Elizabeth Smith, George King, Rosemary Lee, and Jay Hoyle, three of whom live in Huntsville. The couple also has six grandchildren who all live in Huntsville.
As you would expect, King has spent a lot of time in the air, traveling to all parts of the globe. Still, he has managed to include in his busy schedule a variety of other business activities, including directorships at Regions Financial Corporation and Regions Bank of Huntsville. He has held directorships with Interfinancial, Abbott Medical Electronics Company, Baker Automation Systems, Deltacom, and Adelantos de Tecnologia, S.A. de C.V. He is a partner in Valley Telephone Services, Inc. and has been active in real estate development in the Huntsville/Madison County area.
He is a member of the Board of Trustees, The University of Alabama System, and member of the University of Alabama in Huntsville Foundation.
He is a founding trustee of the Alabama Heritage Trust Fund, a founding director of the Alabama Supercomputer Network Authority, has been a member of the Governor’s Task Force on Economic Recovery, and a member of the Council of Twenty-One of the Alabama Commission on High Education, and has served as a director of the Alabama Research Institute.
His civic activities include serving as a founding member and past chairman of the Research Park Board of the City of Huntsville, director of the Huntsville/Madison County Chamber of Commerce, the Huntsville Museum of Art, and the Huntsville Symphony, and a founding director of the Huntsville Hospital Foundation.
He was selected Alabama’s Chief Executive Officer of the Year by The Birmingham News in 1998 and won the Huntsville Madison County Chamber of Commerce’s highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award, in 1994. In 1984 he was named the National Management Association’s Executive of the Year, and in 1997, he was named by Electronic Buyers News, a leading trade journal, as one of “25 industry executives who made a difference,” which called him “the father of the contract electronic manufacturing services industry.”
His hobbies include collecting antiques for his Greek Revival style antebellum home located in Huntsville’s Twickenham Historic District, and he and his wife enjoy entertaining.
King has remained loyal to the city of Huntsville and the red soil and cotton fields that surround it. “I would say that Huntsville has proved fertile soil in which to grow business as well as cotton,” he said.
Despite the changes and the volatility of the electronic boom and the ups and downs of high-tech stocks, Olin King has remained a constant at SCI, focusing on increasing sales, holding down costs, pleasing shareholders, maintaining quality, and being responsive to customer needs.
King recently stepped down as chief executive officer and board chairman in a low-key, matter-of-fact manner that has been a hallmark of his management style. At that time, he was interviewed by The Huntsville Times and was asked, “When you started SCI 38 years ago in your basement, did you ever envision it becoming an $8 billion company ranked No. 245 on the Fortune 500?”
“Yes,” King replied. “I just didn’t think it would take this long.”
