Techopia

Shopify takes lead as Ottawa companies continue to climb Branham300 list of Canada’s top ICT firms

June 28, 2019

Shopify jumped six spots to No. 15 on the Branham300 list of Canada’s top 250 ICT companies for 2019, the highest ranking for an Ottawa firm and the e-commerce juggernaut’s first appearance in the top 20.

The Branham300 ranks the top 250 tech firms in Canada by annual revenue, with figures obtained either by public filings, company disclosure or Branham Group’s estimates.

For the third year in a row, Ottawa’s top three companies on the list remained the same, with Mitel holding steady at No. 16 and Telesat dropping three spots to No. 22. Overall, 29 local firms made the list this year, the same number as in 2018 and down from 32 the year before.

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Three Ottawa-area companies made their debut on the 2019 list: Stittsville’s Decisive Technologies, a data centre solutions firm that made OBJ’s list of fastest-growing companies earlier this year, entered at an impressive No. 67, while its sister company, enterprise cloud solutions firm BriteSky Technologies, came in at No. 218 and Rewind – which provides small businesses with easy access to a cloud backup of their storefronts and other integral data and won an Employees’ Choice Award last December – rounded out the list at No. 250.

In addition to ranking the top 250 companies by revenue, Branham also publishes a list of 25 up-and-coming startups.

Three local firms made this year’s cut: GenM, which looks to fill a skills gap in the marketing space by offering free courses to students and pitched at AccelerateOTT last month; Ruckify, an online rental marketplace whose owners include Canopy Growth CEO Bruce Linton and serial entrepreneur Steve Cody; and ZINation, a graduate of Kanata’s L-Spark incubator that provides software for merchants to generate automatic catalogues and lookbooks for their wares.

Though the number of Ottawa companies on the main list has been shrinking for a few years, the firms that remain tend to be trending in the right direction – 17 out of 29 moved up the rankings in 2019.

That growth trend was also reflected in the list’s overall numbers. The 250 companies generated cumulative revenues of $115.3 billion in fiscal 2018, compared with $16.5 billion a year earlier. That represents a year-over-year jump of 8.5 per cent, well ahead of the bump of just 1.14 per cent between 2017 and 2018.

The results point to a “major growth thrust” in Canada’s information and communications sector, Branham Group CEO Wayne Gudbranson said in a statement.

“The performance of the companies reflects the continual maturation and growth of the Canadian ICT industry as a key economic contributor and rising brand both domestically and globally,” he said.

Nationally, this year’s top five spots were once again occupied by BCE, Celestica, CGI, Rogers and Telus, with Celestica moving up three spots to No. 2 and Telus falling to fifth.