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Tektronix president Pat Byrne will continue running the Washington County company.

(Tektronix image)

Tektronix, godfather to Oregon's technology industry, has a new owner.

East Coast conglomerate Danaher Corp. completed its spinoff of its older, industrial businesses over the weekend. In the process, Tektronix became part of a new company: Fortive, based in Everett, Washington.

Fortive would have had $6.2 billion in revenue last year, according to the new company's financial filings. Its professional instrumentation group, which includes Tektronix, accounted for roughly half of that.

Founded in 1946, Tektronix birthed dozens of spinoff companies and helped lure Intel to Oregon, seeding the Silicon Forest with generations of technological innovation.

Tektronix, though, has struggled since its 2007 sale to Danaher, with successive rounds of layoffs and declining sales. Performance improved early in 2015 but revenue in Fortive's professional instrumentation group fell 4.7 percent last year and was down 6.6 percent in the most recent quarter.

Tektronix makes oscilloscopes and other instruments engineers use to measure the performance of electronic devices. In February, it unveiled a new strategy to introduce products tailored for specific industry needs -- communications, computing and automotive, for example.

Former Tektronix president Jim Lico is Fortive's chief executive. Pat Byrne remains president of Tektronix.

Fortive shares were trading at $49.16 shortly after their Tuesday opening, down 38 cents from where they started the day. That gives the new company a market value just shy of $17 billion, based on 345 million shares Fortive says were created when the company spun out from Danaher.

-- Mike Rogoway

mrogoway@oregonian.com

503-294-7699

@rogoway