For 45 years, Fortune Magazine has been ranking the largest companies in the United States. The result is their annual Fortune 500 list. Sometimes people will refer to the top 100 companies on the list as the "Fortune 100." Essentially, the magazine lists the U.S.-based corporations with the largest revenue in the past year. Fortune calculates revenue using publicly available data, therefore private companies (those whose stock is not traded on a public market) are excluded. U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies are also excluded.
Fortune 500 companies are among the biggest, most profitable, and most powerful companies in America. We're talking serious blue-chips with vast holdings, like Exxon Mobil (ranked #1 on the Fortune 500 for 2001), General Electric (#5), and Philip Morris (#10). Talk about profits -- the top company on the list made over $210 billion in revenues! But even the bottom end of the Fortune 500 list isn't too shabby. Newspaper conglomerate Knight-Ridder (ranked #499) and wireless technology company Qualcomm (#500) pulled in over $3 billion each. That's still a respectable sum, especially in a weak economy.
While the Fortune 500 is limited to American companies, the magazine also publishes the Global 500, which ranks publicly held companies from around the world. Of course, because the U.S. dominates so much of the global economy, many Fortune 500 companies rank high in the Global 500 too. In fact, the first four Global 500 companies of 2001 are the exact same as in the Fortune 500. At #5, the German-American hybrid, DaimlerChrysler, is the first company on the list not based in the U.S.
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