世界500强企业09年大丰收

How was 2009 such a good year for the Fortune 500 companies?

Well, one reason basically they slashed so many jobs that their profits soared. The profits that we saw on the list till this year, if you take all of the Fortune 500 and average out their profits they were up 330%. That's staggering because they were down a lot last year obviously. So it's just, you know, it's an amazing figure. It's the second biggest profit gain that we've seen since we've been doing this list. And the reason why it happened is because they cut cost so much. Because if you actually look at the revenue figure, in other words the sales that they're pulling in by selling stuff, it went down. So that is the figure that usually pulls profits in one direction to the other, so to have the revenues drop so dramatically and yet the profits be up so dramatically. The answer is as you said they slashed so many jobs that they actually you know they saw benefits from that.

So real success in the business world is when revenues are up and profits are up together. You have to have that revenue going up. Now interestingly enough, the No.1 spot, not Exxon Mobil now, Walmart. Does that have something to do with the economy?

It does. I mean Walmart tends to do well in the recessionary environment. Their low prices. You know that's why people shop there, so more people shop there in the climate like what we’ve seen and at the same time Exxon which was No.1 last year and is now No.2 lives and dies by oil prices. And oil prices dropped a lot this year so that sort of explains the reversal there which wasn't so surprising. Those two companies have kind of been, they always have like a reciprocity agreement. They have been flipping back and forth from No.1 and 2 for the past couple of years. So but Walmart is an interesting story. I mean they did inch their revenues up, just a little bit this year even in this climate and their profits were up about 7% so it's a great story there.

There're sorts of little things you can parse. That's what you guys do, it’s great in parse for different, you know trends. Here's one that I thought was interesting. 15 another companies on this year's list are run by female CEOs. You got Xerox, PepsiCo, Avon, Yahoo are just a few of them. But is that a trend you’ll see more often?

Well, it's funny. I mean that's about what it was last year but it's up from seven in 2001, so we've definitely seen an increase. But you know it's a sort of you know, stay the same, roughly the same about from what was last year. I mean maybe that's due to the economy, who knows. But you know I would say big picture in terms of the history of this list, it's still on the upswing.  We'll see more in the years to come.

All right we saw some new companies under the Fortune 100 this year getting bigger Amazon, Delta, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac again. Something a lot of people probably don't want to hear now that we own a piece of those companies. Where are they from these Fortune 500 companies? 57 of the companies are from California , 56 in New York, 24 in Pennsylvania, 21 of the Fortune 500 companies are in Minnesota.

Yeah, I know it's interesting. They come from everywhere, but as you say California and Texas have the biggest representation. Interestingly enough, well maybe not surprising, Ohio and Michigan kind of lost.  The number of Fortune 500 companies from those states decline and you can guess why that is. It's a kind of they are feeling the pain from the manufacturing sector and then states like Virginia and Maryland actually gained. You know that may have something to do with so much activity being focused on DC. We also saw some interesting new comers, Allergan, the company that makes BOTOX who's on the list for the first time, so that's kind of interesting.