As a group, Utah's largest publicly held companies fared quite well compared with their national counterparts during the first nine months of this year.
The Tribune/Bloomberg Index, which measures the share-price performance of the state's 26 leading public companies, rose 8.3 percent from the first of the year through the close of trading Thursday.
By way of comparison, the well-known and widely followed Dow Jones industrial average rose 3.5 percent during that time period while the Standard & Poor's 500 was up only 2.3 percent.
Unlike the Dow and the S&P 500, though, the Utah index comprises primarily small-cap companies. Such corporations have a market capitalization — a figure calculated by multiplying the number of shares a company has outstanding by its stock price — of $1 billion or less.
"Overall, small-cap companies have done a little better than big-cap companies so far this year," said Sterling Jenson, regional managing director for Wells Fargo Capital Management in Salt Lake City.
But he noted there have been big differences in the performance among the equity sectors, with retail up 12 percent while health care and energy stocks fell 2.2 percent.
Utah's best-performing stock during the first nine months of this year was Otix Global Inc., a maker of digital hearing aids whose shares were up 149 percent.
Over the past month, Otix has drawn the interest of two potential suitors.
GN Store Nord A/S of Denmark offered to buy Otix this week for $58 million, an offer that could set off a bidding war with Danish rival William Demant Holding A/S, which bid $50 million earlier in September.
BSD Medical Corp. was Utah's second best-performing stock, with a share price gain of 92 percent. The company manufactures and sells hyperthermia equipment that can be used to treat cancerous tumors and other diseases.
"We recently received FDA clearance for our MTX-180 microwave-ablation product that can be used in destroying tumors," said Dennis Gauger, BSD's chief financial officer. "That clearance allows us to begin marketing it in the United States."
Other Utah-based corporations that saw significant increase in their share prices so far this year were Zions Bancorporation, up 66 percent; Extra Space Storage, up 39 percent; and Questar Corp., a natural gas utility whose stock gained 31 percent.
Eleven Utah companies, though, saw their share prices decline.
Shares of EnergySolutions, the nuclear waste storage company, have fallen 41 percent since the first of the year. Earlier this week EnergySolutions announced it was terminating its 2.5 cent-per-share quarterly dividend.
Raser Technologies, a company that is developing low-temperature geothermal projects, had the state's worst-performing stock. Its shares, which closed Thursday at 24 cents, are down 81 percent since the first of the year.
steve@sltrib.com
