Founded by Robin
Saxby and 11 engineers in a Cambridge barn,
ARM appeared on the first Fast Track 100 in 1997 with sales of £16.7m.
Four months later the microchip designer floated on the London Stock
Exchange, and in December 2012 was in the FTSE100 with a market
cap of £10bn.
Edward Wray founded this betting exchange with Andrew Black in 1999 to allow punters to bet against each other directly online, cutting out bookmakers. It featured on our Tech Track 100 in 2005, and made eight subsequent appearances on our league tables, before floating on the London Stock Exchange in October 2010 with a £1.4bn market valuation.
Trading a
career in investment banking for mail-order fashion, Johnnie Boden's
company appeared on the first Fast Track 100 in 1997 with sales of £5.5m.
It is now a thriving fashion retailer with a strong online brand, a
US presence, and clothing lines for women, men, children and babies.
Its 2011 sales were £246m.
Charles
Dunstone set up his phone retailing business in 1989, and eight years
later it appeared at No 39 on the Fast Track 100 with sales of £64.5m.
The company listed in London in 2000, and, at the end of 2009, had sales
of £1.4bn and now has a market cap of £920m.
Featuring
on our first Profit Track 100 league table in 2000 with profits of £24m,
James Dyson's vacuum cleaner manufacturer saw its market share increase
significantly in the US helped by its appearance on TV show
Friends. The company reached profits of £306m in 2011 and had sales of
£887m.
The Exeter
airline first appeared on our first Top Track 250 in 2005, and reached
sales of £536m in 2008. Led by chairman and CEO Jim French, the company
floated on the LSE in December 2010 at a £215m valuation.
Their
goal at start up was to appear in the Fast Track 100, and the fruit smoothie
maker fulfilled its ambition in 2004, with sales of £11m. It appeared
four more times on the table before Richard Reed and his co-founders
sold a majority stake to Coca Cola in April 2010, valuing the company at £160m.
This chain of
236 pet superstores has appeared on 16 of our league tables, the first
being in 1999, when it was ranked No 77 on the Fast Track 100 with sales
of £36.1m. Founder Anthony Preston and 3i sold a 60% stake to Bridgepoint
in 2004 in a £230m deal, and sales in 2011 reached £500m. KKR led a tertiary buyout from Bridgepoint in January 2010 in a £955m deal.
The
foreign exchange provider appeared on the first Profit Track 100 in
2000 at No 5, with profits of £5.9m. Since then founder Lloyd Dorfman's
company has completed a £1.1bn secondary buyout backed by Apax, was
granted the first non-bank foreign exchange license in China, and achieved
profits of £96m at the end of 2011.
