Growth is never out of fashion – even in a recession winners keep growing – fast.

One of the biggest questions we had when we started working on the Deloitte Fast 50 competition was establishing how much the list would be affected by the recession. The final year’s accounts that feed into the ranking will be for a full financial year starting anywhere between October 2008 and August 2009. This puts the final accounting period slap bang in the middle of the worst recession since the last worst recession since records began – or something like that.

Vintage year: Contrary to our expectations (and fears), this has been a vintage year for the UK’s fastest growing companies. In fact, many measures point to this being one of the best two years in the history of the Fast 50.

• The threshold for entry into the top fifty list in 2010 for example, was 652% growth. The only year the threshold has been higher was 2009 when the threshold was 680% growth.
• The average (mean) percentage growth of the top fifty entrants in the Fast 50 competition was 2,321% growth over five years. The only year to top this was 2009 when the average percentage growth was 2,585%.

This is the percentage growth of the top fifty companies in the UK year by year since 2007:

It is good to see that despite the economic doom and gloom that seems to be accepted by all as the norm, that some notable entrepreneurs and the high growth businesses that they have founded are making huge progress as they continue to grow, create jobs and employment and serve the markets that they target.

Most represented sectors:

The best represented sectors in the Deloitte Fast 50 are unsurprisingly Software and Internet businesses, representing some 58% of the winning entries with telecommunications businesses representing an additional 20%. The scarcity of ‘Greentech’ businesses is probably down to two things: (a) the relative newness of the sector (and thus those businesses have not had five years of revenues) and; (b) the ambiguity inherent in the categorisation. (A ‘Greentech’ business may well consider itself to be an ‘Internet’ business for example as the perceived value in being labelled green/clean has diminished as the terms greentech/cleantech become abused and devalued as more wannabe companies jump on the bandwagon. At the same time, the most progressive cleantech businesses no longer consider themselves ‘cleantech’ but simply offer a better, more sustainable solution, to a specific market.

Deloitte UK Fast 50 2010 by Sector

The UK can even grow hardware & semiconductor businesses!

Despite all of the attention on the Internet sector as a core engine for economic recovery, when it comes to revenue growth over this time, it is actually software sector that dominates with an average growth of Fast 50 winners of 3,941%. Software is closely followed by the semiconductor & components sector where companies including Displaylink and Ubisense contributed to the average 3,899% growth over this period.

Percentage Growth of Fast 50 Winners 2010 by Sector