CORRECTION: The information in this article, originally published June 14, 1009, was corrected July 1, 2009. Key Technology is headquartered in Walla Walla. A story on Sunday's front page about this year's Northwest 100 rankings incorrectly said the company was based in Spokane.

Jun. 14--This is an age of downsizing. Companies are slashing their payrolls, people are trading their SUVs and McMansions for hybrids and condos, and the tumbling stock market has turned a lot of 401(k)s into 201(k)s. In fact, the whole U.S. economy has shrunk for the past three quarters in a row, according to government figures.

So, in keeping with current trends, the Northwest 100, The Seattle Times' annual ranking of the region's best-performing public companies, also has slimmed down. For the first time in the 18 years The Times has compiled the Northwest 100, fewer than 100 companies qualified for it.

The main culprit: last fall's stock-market slide, which pushed dozens of Northwest stocks below $2 a share. The Northwest 100 long has excluded companies whose shares have dropped below $2, but never -- not even during the dot-com collapse earlier this decade -- have so many companies fallen below that threshold.

Among the missing names on this year's list of 87 companies: Micron Technology, Red Lion Hotels, Cray and Hecla Mining, last year's top performer.

But there's another, longer-term trend at work, too: Fewer and fewer publicly traded companies are headquartered in Washington, Oregon or Idaho.

A decade ago, nearly 200 Northwest companies were trading on major exchanges; today, there are just 136. Dozens evaporated in the dot-com bust; others, from big names like Safeco, Puget Energy and Immunex to younger tech firms such as Captaris and Advanced Digital Information, have been vacuumed up by larger companies and private-equity firms.

At the same time, the pipeline of new public companies has run dry. Only two Northwest companies, Kirkland-based Clearwire and First Financial Northwest of Renton, have gone public in the past 2 1/2 years; as recently as 2004, that many could go public in a week.

"There haven't been any real barnburners coming out of the Pacific Northwest for the past three or four years," said Fred Dickson, chief market strategist for the D.A. Davidson brokerage in Portland.

The flow of venture-capital dollars that fertilized dozens of local startups never really recovered from the dot-com bust, Dickson said. During the real-estate boom, much investment capital that might have gone into nurturing young software developers or biotechnology firms got shunted into land development or mortgage finance.