SPOKANE, Wash., Sept. 17, 2001 — Itron, Inc. announced it planned to repurchase up to 300,000 shares of its common stock when Nasdaq reopened for trading Monday morning.
The company's board of directors initially authorized the repurchase of 1 million shares of its stock in May 1998. Itron has approximately 15.7 million shares of its common stock outstanding.
"We have a high degree of confidence in Itron's future," said LeRoy Nosbaum, president and CEO. "Our plans for this year and into next are solid and we believe repurchases of Itron stock at current market prices are in the best interests of our shareholders."
Itron Inc. is a technology provider and source of knowledge to the energy and water industries for collecting, analyzing, and applying critical data about electric, gas, and water usage.
Itron technology touches more than $200 billion in energy and water transactions annually.
Today, Itron systems are installed at approximately 2,000 utilities in over 45 countries around the world and are being used to collect data from 275 million electric, gas, and water meters.
Of those, more than 700 customers use Itron's radio and telephone-based technology to automatically collect information from almost 19 million of those meters.
Itron technology is also in use at a number of the newly created wholesale energy markets in the U.S. and Canada to provide critical billing and settlement systems for the power flowing into and out of those deregulating markets.
