When Nick St. George took over Oakwood Homes in 1979, the company was barely visible on the manufactured housing scene, generating $42 million in revenues.

Today, it is the nation's No. 1 retailer of manufactured homes with seven percent of the fragmented market. Annual revenues are nearly $1 billion, and the company has enjoyed 50 percent yearly net income growth for each of the past five years.

Thank the hard-charging St. George for those stats, analysts say.

"He's been acquiring manufacturing capacity and very cleverly building his company-owned retail dealer network around that capacity," said John H. Diffendal, J.C. Bradford's research director.

At the same time, St. George has sought to insulate the company from market uncertainties through a "vertical integration" strategy -- taking in-house control of the entire process from raw materials through manufacture, sales, financing, insuring and set up to service after the sale.

"Many of these nonintegrated companies have had a much more difficult time," said Diffendal.

Oakwood, with 6,000 employees nationwide and more than 670 in the Triad, was ranked seventh in the News & Record's annual survey of publicly traded companies in the Triad. Revenues for 1996 were $973,922,000, up more than 18.5 percent from the previous year, and net income -- $68,255,000 -- was up more than 50 percent.

The company has benefited in recent years from strong industry-wide growth. While that growth is slowing, analysts believe Oakwood's aggressive expansion program and vertical integration will help it gain market share at the expense of weaker competitors, some of whom may well be forced out of business.

"Most of the retailers in the industry are very small," said Robert Curran of Merrill Lynch. "When the industry growth levels out, they are vulnerable."

As for Oakwood, the numbers all point to strong growth. Its new home retail sales have gone from 5,500 units in 1991 to 20,100 in 1996, and the number of company-owned sales centers has gone from 93 in 1991 to 255 last year.

"We're committed to 20 percent growth rates (in earnings per share) for some time," St. George said. "We'll be growing every facet of our business. We have been extremely focused on our vision, mission and strategy, and we don't veer from those."