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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Four Eastern Washington Firms Make ‘Fast 50’ List Three Others Ranked Last Year Drop Off 1997 Listing

Michael Murphey Staff writer

Fewer Eastern Washington firms than last year have made a list of the state’s 50 fastest-growing high-technology companies.

Only four companies east of the Cascades made Deloitte & Touche’s Washington Technology Fast 50 - an annual statewide ranking of high-tech companies based on five-year revenue growth. The list was announced Thursday in Seattle.

Ranked Eastern Washington firms are Geosafe Corp. of Richland, Telect Inc., of Liberty Lake, and Itron Inc. and DataPro Solutions Inc., both of Spokane.

The 1996 list included seven Eastern Washington companies.

Overall, the 1997 “Fast 50” had a combined average five-year revenue growth of 1,390 percent.

Larry Hile, a partner with Deloitte & Touche, said his firm - along with co-sponsors Nasdaq, Piper Jaffray Inc., US West Communications and the Washington Software & Digital Media Alliance - conducted the second annual ranking to highlight the region’s high-technology success.

“These 50 companies, with different products and different customers, share a passion for innovation and an ability to stand out in an increasingly crowded field,” Hile said in a news release.

“More than 75 percent of the companies qualifying this year represent the bits, bytes and brains of the industry, as opposed to tangible hardware products,” he added. “Technology breeds new technology and high-tech services, a process that bodes well for future growth across the board.”

Telect was the top-ranking company from the Spokane area. The designer and manufacturer of communications products employs 750 people in Spokane and about 850 worldwide. Telect had about $75 million in revenues during 1996.

That performance helped push it to 35th on the Fast 50 list with 254 percent growth in revenues over the past five-year period. Telect ranked 43rd on last year’s list.

The other two Spokane area representatives, though, saw their rankings decline.

Itron, a manufacturer of automatic meter-reading devices that employes 500 in Spokane, had revenues of $177.6 million during the last fiscal year. Itron ranked 47th on the list, down from 33rd a year ago. Itron’s revenue growth has been 151 percent the past five years.

DataPro Solutions ranked 48th, down from 19th on last year’s list. The company employs seven and had revenues of about $2 million in 1996. Its five-year revenue growth rate has been 148 percent. The company performs computer services, such as payrolls, for other companies, and sells computer solutions for business tasks.

Dropping from last year’s list were Advanced Hardware Architectures of Pullman, Teknon Corp., of Spokane, and Ideal Semiconductor Inc. of Liberty Lake.

They were among 20 companies that slipped from the 1996 list. Hile said the turnover is indicative of how competitive Washington’s technology sector has become.

Small start-ups experience explosive growth, pushing more mature - but still highly successful - companies from the list.

Indeed, four of the top five companies on the list were ranked for the first time in 1997.

Leading the list is Optiva Corp., a Bellevue-based manufacturer of the Sonicare toothbrush. The company’s revenues have grown at a phenomenal rate of 31,943 percent over the past five years.

Second is Vixel Corp. of Bothell, which provides intensive data storage and retrieval solutions. Vixel has had revenue growth of 3,794 percent between 1992 and 1996.

Rounding out the top five are WinEstimator Inc., a Kent-based firm that provides professional construction software solutions, 3,794 percent revenue growth; Bothell-based CellPro Inc., a biotechnology company, 3,061 percent; and Rod Asher & Associates, a Bellevue company that has a proprietary database, and offers customer software, consulting and tools for software engineers, 2,567 percent.

, DataTimes