Welcome to the Big Leagues

Newport Corp. in Irvine and Procom Technology Inc. in Santa Ana reached new benchmarks in recent days--inclusion in the Russell indexes of the largest publicly traded U.S. companies.

Newport, a maker of components for fiber-optic communications, semiconductor equipment, computer peripherals and scientific research apparatus, was added to the Russell 1000 Index. Procom, a company that develops attached storage for computer networks, has been added to the Russell 3000 Index.

The indexes, compiled by the Frank Russell Co., are measured by market capitalization, which is the stock price times the number of shares outstanding. Newport is worth $3.47 billion, and Procom nearly $611 million.

Investors put more than $175 billion annually in funds that rely on Russell’s U.S. indexes as investment models.

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Karen Alexander covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-5637 or at karen.alexander@latimes.com.