The TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV) has released its yearly list of the 50 best-performing companies for 2024, and tech companies out west made a particularly strong showing.
The Venture 50 list ranks companies based on performance on the exchange for the past year across five sectors: technology; cleantech and life sciences; diversified industries; mining; and energy. The rankings are based on three key metrics: market capitalization growth, share price appreciation, and trading value.
BC and Ontario companies also dominated the TSXV’s cleantech and life sciences list.
Performance was especially strong for tech companies, according to the TSXV, with the sector seeing average share prices grow by 178 percent. Of the 10 technology companies on this year’s list, seven hail from British Columbia (BC). These included Hive Digital Technologies, Digihost Technology, Tiny, Neptune Digital Assets, Gatekeeper Systems, and Total Telcom.
Vancouver-based Hive Digital, the top-performing technology company on the Venture 50, owns and operates data centres. The company claims to offer renewably sourced computing power to the Web3, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing sectors. The company recorded a 206 percent spike in its share price over the last year.
Victoria-based Tiny, which ranked fifth on the technology list with a share price increase of 26 percent, invests in or acquires majority stakes in businesses. Last year, Tiny acquired Letterboxd, as well as B2B e-commerce marketplace WholesalePet.com from Toronto-based Emerge Commerce, and previously acquired a majority stake in fellow Victoria company Button.
Alberta’s OneSoft Solutions ranked eighth on the TSXV technology list with a share price increase of 88 percent, while Québec’s Diagnos ranked ninth, tracking a share price growth of 35 percent.
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BC and Ontario companies also dominated the TSXV’s cleantech and life sciences list, though Alberta-based Westbridge Renewable Energy claimed the top spot with a share price increase of 95 percent during the year.
According to the TSXV, this year’s companies delivered an average share price appreciation of 121 percent and saw an average market capitalization increase of 248 percent, and the total market cap of Venture 50 companies was $23.1 billion– an increase of over $7.5 billion from the year prior.
A December report from Bloomberg highlighted that Canadian tech stocks in the S&P/TSX composite index were expected to outperform US tech indexes in 2023, following what was one of the worst years for tech stocks in over a decade. Toronto’s tech sector in particular managed to outshine its counterparts in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Korea, Australia, and China.
While tech appeared to perform well on the TSXV last year, a number of public Canadian tech companies faced challenges in 2023. A sizable group of these companies, including Q4 Inc., BBTV Holdings, mCloud, Farmers Edge, and Mednow have all either delisted from public exchanges or are in talks to go private.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Yiorgos Ntrahas.