Shell is the global leader by turnover and Gazprom leads by net profit. PKN Orlen moved up 50 places in the Fortune magazine ranking.
The latest Fortune Global 500 ranking brings considerable changes, and not among the leaders alone. Netherlands’ Royal Dutch Shell ranked first by 2011 turnover ($484.5bn), ahead of U.S.’s Exxon Mobil ($452.9 bn) and last year’s leader, the Wal-Mart chain ($446.9bn).
According to Shelley DuBois of the CNNMoney portal, Shell is front-page news today because of its push to drill for oil in the Arctic. This is a controversial plan because any oil spill in the icy waters near Alaska could turn into an ecological disaster. Nevertheless, Shell wants to start drilling this July and it reckons there are 90 billion barrels to be got out of the Arctic.
Shell claims that in the next decade or two the Arctic will become the world’s largest source of oil. ‘In the first quarter 2012 Shell showed an 11% increase in profit, year-to-year, to $7.7bn. Some of the increase in revenue was generated by long-term projects which have only now come on stream, such as the gas liquefying facility in Qatar, or production from oil-bearing sands in Canada’, adds DuBois.
The largest ten include BP, Sinopec (first Chinese company to have made it to the top ten), China National Petroleum, State Grid, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Toyota Motor. Russia’s Gazprom leads by profitability with a record profit of $44.5bn (by turnover, it ranks fifteenth with a revenue of $157bn ). Exxon comes second ($44.1bn). Germany’s E.ON (sixteenth by revenue) leads in the loss-making giants category. With revenue almost equal to Gazprom’s ($157.1bn) this group showed an end-of-year loss of $3.1bn in 2011. Wal-Mart is the largest employer (2.2 m), ahead of China’s China National Petroleum (1.67 m) and State Grid (1.53 m). In Europe Germany’s Volkswagen is the largest employer (502 thousand). PKN Orlen, the only Polish company on the list, made a tremendous leap, by 50 slots, moving up from the fourth hundred to 297th place ($36.1bn revenue, $0.79bn profit). This is due to an over-30-percent increase in turnover. Like every year, U.S. businesses dominate on the list (132 companies) but, unlike in the past, this year Chinese corporations (73) outnumber Japanese ones (68). In this region, Russia boasts seven companies on the list: Gazprom, Lukoil, Rosneft, TNK-BP, Sberbank, AFK Sistiema, and Surgutneftgas. Hungary’s only company, MOL, ranks 412th.
Related reading:
Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, p. 15, “Lista 500 najbogatszych firm świata to tryumf tradycyjnej gospodarki” [The 500 Richest Companies List: Triumph of Traditional Economy]
Source: Rzeczpospolita, 11 July 2012, by Iwona Trusewicz