Insights into growth in SoCal: Internet advertising, semiconductors, biotech, medical equipment, and more…
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009Perusing the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list for this year — the ranking of the fastest growing companies in North America, based on the last five years of revenue–it’s quite surprising to note the sheer number of Southern California firms listed. Deloitte, which ranks these every year (disclaimer: Deloitte recently became a sponsor of socalTECH, though that has no influence in our coverage), uses the five year revenue numbers of companies to create their listing. This morning, we’ve been bombarded by companies bragging about their improvements (i.e. “We’re number 480 something on the list!”).
However, it was interesting to note that Number 1 on the list was ReachLocal, the Woodland Hills-based provider of local search advertising services — topping the list with 146,050% growth over 5 years. The firm started out in 2004 with revenues of $100,000; the company reported it had revenues in 2008 of nearly $146.7M.
So, what can you draw from the list of companies? Just glancing over the list (there’s really too many SoCal firms to completely list them all):
1. Internet advertising and related industries, at least for SoCal, were strong. Aside from ReachLocal, I see The Search Agency (SEO services, #83), Hydra (Internet ads, 87), Gorilla Nation at 243, and Oversee.net at 326.
2. Semiconductors — which hasn’t seen much investment in recent years, and seems to have been mostly ignored– still seems to be powering growth rates, with San Diego’s Entropic Communications at number 5 on the list. Westlake Village-based Inphi is at 134. San Diego’s Ethertronics is at 143.
3. Medical equipment and biotech was more than well represented – Carlsbad-based GenOptix was at 15, Tustin’s AMDL Diagnostics was at 19, Irvine-based Spectrum Pharmaceuticals at 22, San Diego’s Santarus at 23, Ista Pharmaceuticals based in Irvine at 47, Aliso Viejo-based Clarient at 59, San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals at 76, CytRx in Los Angeles at 120, EndoLogix, in Irvine, at 169 were just some of the firms in that category.
4. Software had a fairly good showing. Cerritos-based IGNIFY is 71,San Diego’s ESET is 105, Kyriba, based in San Diego, is 184; Smith Micro, Aliso Viejo, was number 210.
So, what other interesting observations can you gather from the list? One–is very few, if any of these companies (who seem to be seeing not only growth but rather impressive revenues) are the hyped, brand-name Silicon Valley Internet companies you might expect (Silicon Valley’s own list of high growth companies came from the biotech/med equipment/semiconductor/networking/cleantech/software industries). Second, here in SoCal, there are an awful lot of Orange County companies represented, despite not a lot of recent venture activity–in part because of biotech/medical devices firms who are hitting their stride.
