ASD is a company confident in its future. The combination of the firm’s portable instruments, application experience and two decades in natural resource management, as well as high natural resource commodity prices, has boosted its management team’s confidence that its compound annual growth rate will be above 25% over the next five years—perhaps higher, if ASD can find the opportunity expand beyond its current target markets.

The company’s current target markets are remote sensing and mining. The firm offers NIR spectrometers; spectroradiometers, which measure the spectral density given off by a light source; and sampling accessories. When the Colorado-based firm, which has grown to 46 employees, was founded in 1990 as Analytical Spectral Devices, it was focused on earth science, with the goal of providing researchers with a portable instrument that could be used in the field. This instrument came to fruition as the Personal Spectrometer II spectroradiometer. Today, ASD has expanded into industrial manufacturing markets. “What we came to realize is that the core capabilities of the company were not only instrumentation but natural resources measurements and in situ measurements,” CEO and President Dave Rzasa told IBO. “That is today our core capabilities—not only high-quality instrumentation, not only portable, but also the applications knowledge in a natural resources area.”

ASD offers benchtop NIR analyzers, such as the QualitySpec7000 for general applications, but its management team describes portable, application-specific analyzers for niche markets as its primary strength. Many niche-market customers do not have the resources for NIR calibrations, so a group within ASD known as SummitCAL works with them to develop new calibrations and applications. “We set up programs with our customers to find their needs, target a goal and then help them through a series of technical exercises to develop those calibration models,” explained Michael Lands, director of Business Development. “So, basically, it’s a service that we provide to our customers and to the marketplace. It consists of calibration modeling, consulting, primary reference analysis and a number of different things.”

ASD has five product lines: QualitySpec for process control, LabSpec for material analysis and identification, RxSpec for pharmaceutical applications, TerraSpec for mining exploration, and AgriSpec for vegetation and soil analysis. Notable about ASD’s products is that they expand on traditional NIR to include wavelengths in the visible/NIR range, from 350 nm to 2500 nm. This benefits customers in two ways, said Mr. Rzasa. “It allows them to buy an instrument that meets both needs—NIR as well as visible—but it also allows us to bring in additional information to the calibrations that the SummitCAL group participates in.”

ASD intends to continue to concentrate on its two main applications. Also on the horizon is a plan to expand its distribution network, which currently covers 70 countries. International sales make up 70% of company revenues. ASD also intends to explore supplying other industries with its portable instrumentation. “We think that there are vertical markets that are also very natural resource intensive that can benefit from our technology in the future,” Mr. Rzasa said.