Use of Exports to Accelerate Adoption of NMR Geophysical Technology

Since 2002, Vista Clara Inc. has focused on developing and commercializing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) geophysical instruments for groundwater investigations. When we started on this endeavor, we assumed that the US groundwater and environmental services industries would be eager to embrace new NMR geophysical technologies and our sales would be principally in the US domestic market. This assumption has proven incorrect. Instead export sales, in our case especially to Australia and China, have outpaced our sales in the US. We are increasingly finding influential early adopters of our technologies overseas. In essence, exports have become the basis for our growth in both revenues and profits. In this discussion, we review our company’s growth in both domestic and export sales over the past 5 years, and examine key structural differences between the US and international markets for groundwater management and remediation technologies, that may help explain the relative ease of selling new groundwater and remediation technologies overseas.