Israeli Firms Top Fastest-Growing EMEA Tech Companies
Three Israeli firms topped Deloitte’s list of the fastest-growing technology companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Communications/networking companies Voltaire, Ltd and Celltick Technologies took the top two spots in the 2007 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA awards, followed by semiconductor/equipment maker Runcom Technologies.
Other key trends observed in this year’s rankings:
The United Kingdom has the most ranked companies with 91 of the 50, followed by France with 68.
- Average five-year revenue growth for all companies is 1,443%, the highest since the awards began.
- 79.5% of this year’s CEOs were extremely or very confident of managing the same growth rates over the coming two years.
- The software sector continues to dominate the ranking, making up 200 of the 500 companies.
- Proportional to population numbers, technology firms in Norway, Israel, Sweden, Ireland, Finland and Holland are in a class of their own when it comes to technology acceleration, with high-growth technology firms between 2 and 5 times more common than anywhere else in the region.
- Good technology people are becoming harder to come by. Finding, hiring and retaining qualified employees is the greatest operational challenge for just under half of CEOs, significantly up on previous years.
- Offshoring of key functions is on the cards. While 13.4% of firms currently employ more than 15% of their workforce abroad, CEOs see this figure rising to 46.6% within 5 years.
The current financial turbulence and economic uncertainty does not appear to have made the front-runners in the technology race in EMEA either slow their pace or lose their focus.
While the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA shows a consistent increase in average growth rates year on year, this is in stark contrast to that of the North America Fast 500, where average growth rates have been falling since 2001. Fast 500 North America shows average five year revenue growth rates falling from a peak of 6,772% in 2002 to 1,823% in 2007.
The report is available for download from the Technology Fast 500 EMEA web site.
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