How to Find and Use 'Top 100' Company Rankings

What companies are the biggest, fastest growing, most profitable, best to work for? The Fortune 100/500/1000 lists are the best known of the bunch, but there are plenty of other company rankings that provide incredibly useful information for business folk, researchers, students, stockbrokers and everyone else interested in the world of big business. Here are some of the best lists out there.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. The lists from Fortune are the granddaddy of business lists. Though commonly known as the Fortune 100, there are also Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 lists of various sorts. The lists can be ranked by revenues and profits, as well as by how fast sales and profits are growing. The lists can also be sorted by industry sector, geography, and a few other variables.
   
   The lists are available free on the internet at the Fortune.com site. See resource links, below, for full access to the lists.
   
   The top companies on the current Fortune 1000 list of the largest companies in the US are:
   
   1 Wal-Mart Stores
   2 Exxon Mobil
   3 Chevron
   4 General Motors
   5 ConocoPhillips
   6 General Electric
   7 Ford Motor
   8 Citigroup
   9 Bank of America Corp.
   10 AT&T
   11 Berkshire Hathaway
   12 J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
   13 American International Group
   14 Hewlett-Packard
   15 International Business Machines
   16 Valero Energy
   17 Verizon Communications
   18 McKesson
   19 Cardinal Health
   20 Goldman Sachs Group
   21 Morgan Stanley
   22 Home Depot
   23 Procter & Gamble
   24 CVS Caremark
   25 UnitedHealth Group
2. Not to be outdone, Forbes.com offers lists of the largest companies in the world (see resource links, below, for full access to the lists). the Forbes lists can be ranked by sales, profits, assets or market cap, and can also be sorted by country and industry.
   
   The top companies on the Forbes Global 2000 list are:
   
   1 HSBC Holdings
   2 General Electric
   3 Bank of America
   4 JPMorgan Chase
   5 ExxonMobil
   6 Royal Dutch Shell
   7 BP
   8 Toyota Motor
   9 ING Group
   10 Berkshire Hathaway
   10 Royal Bank of Scotland
   12 AT&T
   13 BNP Paribas
   14 Allianz
   15 Total
   16 Wal-Mart Stores
   17 Chevron
   18 American Intl Group
   19 Gazprom
   20 AXA Group
   21 Banco Santander
   22 ConocoPhillips
   23 Goldman Sachs Group
   24 Citigroup
   25 Barclays
   
   
   Forbes has a lot of other interesting lists, and is well worth taking a look at (see resource links, below).
3. GreatPlacestoWork.com produces an annual list (for Fortune, again) of -- guess what -- the 100 best companies to work for (see resource links, below, for full access to the lists). The current crop of best companies to work for includes:
   
   1 Google
   2 Quicken Loans
   3 Wegmans Food Markets
   4 Edward Jones
   5 Genentech
   6 Cisco Systems
   7 Starbucks
   8 Qualcomm
   9 Goldman Sachs
   10 Methodist Hospital System
   11 Boston Consulting Group
   12 Nugget Market
   13 Umpqua Bank
   14 Network Appliance
   15 W. L. Gore & Associates
   16 Whole Foods Market
   17 David Weekley Homes
   18 OhioHealth
   19 Arnold & Porter
   20 Container Store
   21 Principal Financial Group
   22 American Century Investments
   23 JM Family Enterprises
   24 American Fidelity Assurance
   25 Shared Technologies
4. Need to know even more? A well-regarded resource is Gary Price's List of Lists, which includes Top X-Hundred lists in dozens of industry categories, and touching on innumerable topics. For instance, here the current list of the world's largest beauty-products companies:
   
   1 Procter & Gamble
   2 L'Oréal
   3 Unilever
   4 Estée Lauder
   5 Avon
   6 Shiseido
   7 Beiersdorf
   8 Kao
   9 Henkel
   10 Johnson & Johnson
   11 Limited Brands
   12 LVMH
   13 Coty
   14 Colgate-Palmolive
   15 Mary Kay
   16 Yves Rocher
   17 Access Business Group
   18 Kose
   19 Amore Pacific
   20 Revlon
   
   There is too much here to describe the site fully, but it's certainly worth spending some time and checking it out (see resource links, directly below, for full access to the lists).