Eight Philippine conglomerates have been included in Forbes’ inaugural list of Best Over A Billion companies in the Asia-Pacific region with revenues of $1 billion or more.
The Philippine companies that made it to the list were Ayala Corp. ($5.22 billion), Cosco Capital ($3.19 billion), GT Capital Holdings Inc. ($3.79 billion), JG Summit Holdings Inc. ($5.32 billion), Jollibee Foods Corp. ($3.06 billion), Megaworld Corp. ($1.02 billion), San Miguel Food and Beverage Inc.($5.43 billion) and SM Investments Corp. ($7.99 billion).
Forbes in a statement released Wednesday said the new list was meant to complement the long-established Best Under a Billion list of the 200 best-performing, small and mid-sized companies in the Asia-Pacific region with less than $1 billion in revenue.
From a pool 3,200 listed companies in the Asia-Pacific region with $1 billion or more in revenue in their latest financial year, Forbes reduced the list to just 200 names using several criteria, including average five-year sales, operating income growth, return on capital and projected growth over the next one to two years.
Forbes said unprofitable firms and those whose sales declined in the past five years were eliminated from the list.
Companies with long-term debt equal to or greater than half their capital and those with governance or legal problems were also excluded.
“Our goal is to find the region’s best-run outfits that are doing well on not just one metric but across many of them,” Forbes said.
“While companies from China, Japan and South Korea naturally dominated the list due to the larger candidate pool, many came from smaller markets such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. The final result is a list that represents the best of Asia-Pacific’s big companies,” it added.
Forbes noted that the connection between the companies and members of the Asia-Pacific rich lists showed that nearly about two-thirds of the companies on the list were controlled or connected to families or individuals who have appeared on the magazine’s rich lists.
