2000 Annual ReportTo Our Shareholders and Friends
The diversity of our business was a key factor in our success. In 2000, our top 100 customers represented only 35 percent of our business, no industry represented more than 10 percent of our total revenue, and we sold products to more than 24,000 different companies in more than 40 countries around the world. We saw strong growth in sales to new economy customers racing to market in such areas as optical networks and next generation video games, and we also had success with a tremendous variety of well established, old economy customers making products such as light bulbs, refrigerators, tires, and more. In 1995, we set a very ambitious goal to aggressively increase the percentage of revenue we invest in R&D from 11 to 14 percent. Historically, increased R&D investment has significantly impacted our long-term growth. In 2000, we met our goal of investing 14 percent of revenue in R&D, and customer reaction to our products indicated that our vision and execution were right on target and right on time. This year we introduced LabVIEW 6i worldwide with versions in English, German, French, and Japanese. LabVIEW 6i empowers our customers to fully leverage the Internet in their work. LabVIEW 6i was recognized with numerous prestigious awards from key publications around the world, and phenomenal customer reaction drove record sales and very strong growth in 2000. Our investments into new and emerging product areas also continued to pay off in 2000, driving strong growth in our PXI platform for complete system solutions, our machine vision and motion control products, our FieldPoint™ platform for distributed data collection, our LabVIEW Real-Time software for embedded and real-time applications, and our TestStand™ software for high-volume manufacturing applications. With our expanded product portfolio, we had success penetrating further into our top global accounts and sold more complete system solutions to our customers. Throughout 2000, our average order size increased steadily to more than $2,500 by the end of the year. We believe we have an opportunity to continue this trend and sell more to our existing customers. Successful execution is key to taking advantage of this opportunity. Our success in integrating the Web directly into our business model has made both NI and our customers more efficient and productive. We enjoyed strong traffic to our ni.com™ Web site and strong growth in e-commerce as customers and prospects conducted their business with us more easily and efficiently through the Web. In addition, the automated technical support features of our Web site saved NI the equivalent time of 50 technical support engineers by the end of 2000. For the second consecutive year, NI was named among FORTUNE magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For in America. It gives me great satisfaction, both as a founder and a shareholder, to know that our employees enjoy working at NI as much as I do. Our success in recruiting and retaining top talent in 2000 puts us in a very strong position to execute on our opportunities for the future. I congratulate and thank our customers, shareholders, employees, and suppliers for their support in making 2000 yet another record year for NI. We are proud of our track record and look forward to the future - never forgetting that our customers' success is our success. The value we can deliver to our customers today is the highest in our history.
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Throughout our history, NI has delivered long-term value to our shareholders. As we approached our 25th anniversary, we continued our proven track record of success. Strong demand and world-class execution enabled us to deliver our 24th consecutive year of record revenues and double-digit revenue growth.
