Nov. 1--Despite the steady flow of mostly positive economic news, topped off last week with the report that the nation had ended its longest slump in more than 60 years, it is hard to shed the worry that the recovery could stall before it did much good.

The argument that the economic rebound is for real, that the tide has turned for more companies than not, was bolstered by an Inquirer analysis of third-quarter revenue changes at companies in the Philadelphia area.

Revenue growth is crucial to replacing the 7.2 million U.S. jobs lost since December 2007.

An executive with a sharp scalpel and the will to use it can generate profit gains, which is what happened at chemical giant DuPont Co., of Wilmington. But sales growth must come from the increased willingness of consumers to open their wallets. And without higher sales, businesses have no reason to add workers, regardless of what the Obama administration does to encourage hiring.

Through Friday, 33 nonfinancial companies in the region with at least $10 million in quarterly revenue had reported results for the period around Sept. 30.

For the second consecutive quarter, 20 of them reported sales growth compared with the previous quarter. That is twice as many as had sales gains in last year's fourth quarter, when financial panic drove business managers into hiding.

One of the companies, Healthcare Services Group Inc., appears to have glided through the crisis unscathed. The Bensalem provider of housekeeping and food services to 2,200 health-care facilities in 47 states and Canada posted a revenue gain in each of the six quarters analyzed.

Others in the services, technology, and pharmaceuticals sectors have been up and down. CDI Corp., a Philadelphia outsourcing firm, said "business-development efforts are beginning to build momentum in what appears to be a stabilizing economy."

Meanwhile, some manufacturers, including Ametek Inc., Airgas Inc., Carpenter Technology Corp., and Knoll Inc. continued to incur falling sales.

In Reading, executives at Carpenter Technology, which manufactures specialty metals for aerospace, industrial, and medical-equipment markets, assured investors last week that its revenues, down five quarters in a row, had bottomed and would head back up.

Andrew B. Cogan, chief executive officer of Knoll, an office-furniture manufacturer in East Greenville, Montgomery County, was more guarded, saying that stabilization does not equal growth.

"As we look into the fourth quarter and beyond, major leading indicators like service-sector job creation, office-space absorption, and the architectural billing index are all in very, very negative territory," Cogan told analysts, according to a Bloomberg News transcript.

The view was completely different from the seat of Gerard Paul, the CEO of Vishay Intertechnology Inc., which is based in Malvern and manufactures semiconductors and other electronic components all over the world. "The world economy and also electronics in quarter three continued to come back. It came back across all geographies, all markets, and all sales channels," he said.

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