PhillyDeals: Qlik to offer shares on Nasdaq

Qlik Technologies Inc., of Radnor, plans to sell a minority stake worth about $100 million in an initial public offering on the Nasdaq stock market Friday. Morgan Stanley is leading the sale.

Qlik (people who work there call it "click-tech") employs about 600, including 46 at its Radnor-Chester Road headquarters.

They make and sell QlikView-brand "in-memory associated search technology," designed to dig up, simplify, and use business data from workstations or smartphones out in the field.

Sales topped $157 million last year, up from $118 million a year earlier and $81 million the year before that, to clients the company says include BP P.L.C., Campbell Soup Co., Colonial Life, Dannon, ING, Kraft Foods Inc., Symantec Corp., and Britain's National Health Service, among others. Net income was $6.9 million last year, $3 million the year before.

The company was founded in Sweden in 1993. Most Qlik staffers work in Sweden and other countries outside the United States. Chief executive officer Lars Bjork was educated as an engineer and formerly worked for midsize tech companies in Sweden.

How did its bosses end up in Radnor? Early backers include Paul Wahl, former chief executive of German-owned, Newtown Square-based SAP America Inc., and ex-SAP international markets boss Alex Ott. They also worked at Siebel Systems Inc.

Besides investing, they invited Bjork to move Qlik near their homes, and they helped oversee its entry into the business-software market, where giant system vendors such as SAP and Oracle Corp. are trying to cope with cheap, fast competition from upstart niche firms.

The largest pre-public Qlik shareholders are Israeli tech investor Erel N. Margalit's Jerusalem Venture Partners and Silicon Valley buyout firm Accel Partners, who together own more than half of Qlik. Company officials wouldn't comment beyond their Securities and Exchange Commission filings, citing the "quiet period" before securities sales.

Fix-up on South Broad

Building-trade workers from Brooklyn to Milwaukee have joined their Philadelphia union brothers from nine trades this summer in restoring the fire-blackened, gilded, hand-plastered ceiling four stories over the office floor at 123 S. Broad St., the flagship branch of the region's dominant bank, currently called Wachovia.