The initial shortlist for our analysis of the fastest-growing companies was developed based on a two-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of total revenue, counting back from the most recent available quarterly data for each company.
We pulled the data from S&P’s Capital IQ database in April 2024, and filtered the list based on several additional criteria. First, we limited the list to publicly traded companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue that are headquartered in Europe, the United States, or Canada. We also sought to eliminate any company that had experienced a temporary post-pandemic spike in growth by ensuring that every company had seen positive growth in the year before the sample. Then, working with AlixPartners’ industry experts, we excluded companies that were operating subsidiaries or did not meet our industry criteria. We also eliminated companies that had primarily grown through M&A, to better identify the strategies and activities that produce superior results from existing assets and lines of business.
We chose to focus on five broad industry categories: consumer products, retail, technology, media and telecommunications, and industrials. This segmentation allowed us to compare like with like as we identified top growers and growth drivers. While our choice omits some important segments (such as healthcare, business and financial services, and entertainment and hospitality), it provides an excellent cross-section of the economy and, in our experience, holds up a mirror to growth that is revealing for almost all industries.
Figure 1 – Fastest-growing companies in the five selected industries of the AlixPartners Supergrowers Study