MOSCOW, July 17. American magazine Fortune recently published its annual Global 500 ratings of the best companies in the world. The current ratings are based on results for 2002. Three Russian companies are in the list, these being Gazprom, LUKOIL and YUKOS. According to the YUKOS press office this Russian company was voted the best company for return of capital, something quite unprecedented in international economics. In this category LUKOIL took only 39th place.
YUKOS also took second place in the rating for return on sales (it provided 28% profit on all sales), beating other companies such as Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Nokia and Coca Cola. Gazprom came 11th in this category while LUKOIL came only 34th.
None the less, analysts say it is still difficult for Russian companies to compete with foreign companies in terms of total sales. Gazprom had sales of USD 19.55 billion and took 235th place in the ratings, LUKOIL had sales of USD USD 13.45 billion and took 377th place while YUKOS had sales of USD 10.91 billion and took only 461th place in the ratings. For the second year running US retail network Walmart had the highest sales which came to USD 246.5 billion. Other companies in the top ten were ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch/Shell and BP from the oil and gas industry, Ford Motor Company, Daimler Chrysler and Toyota from the car-making industry and also US General Electric and Japanese Mitsubishi.
Fortune has been printing ratings once every year since 1955.
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