Mobile phone sector looking good
BusinessWeek has published its latest list of the world’s major technology companies ranked according to their financial performance over the past year.
Amazon.com came top, followed by Apple, but after that the US wasn’t as dominant as may have been expected, with various mobile phone handset-makers and operators from around the world all gaining high rankings.
Canadian Research In Motion (BlackBerry) was third, Japanese console maker Nintendo fourth and US hard drive outfit Western Digital in fifth. Mobile related companies dominate the rest of the top ten, with only Asus at ninth splitting-up America Movil, China Mobile, Nokia and HTC.
Traditional US giants crop up further down the list, with Microsoft at 23, HP at 30 and Intel at 58.Only 33 of the 100 are US companies this year, compared to 43 last year and 75 ten years ago.
The ranking is the product of the aggregate of a few performance indicators. The company that performed best over all of them came top. US phone company AT&T was number one in revenues, with $120 billion.
Brazilian payment processing outfit Redecard came top of the revenue growth chart with an awesome 305 percent and this also propelled it to the top of the return on equity list, with 135 percent.
RIM just edged LG Electronics in the shareholder return chart with 152 percent, while good, old Microsoft still tops the overall profit list with over $16 billion – roughly half a Yahoo!.
