Sixteen M'sian firms on Forbes ranking of world's biggest public companies

KUALA LUMPUR: Sixteen Malaysian firms made it to Forbes’ latest annual Global 2000 ranking of the world’s biggest, most powerful and most valuable public companies.

They are Malayan Banking Bhd (ranked 371), Tenaga Nasional (408), CIMB Group (574), Public Bank (578), Sime Darby (709), Axiata Group (932), Genting (1122), RHB Capital (1185), Hong Leong Financial Group (1287), MISC (1318), AmBank Group (1331), Petronas Chemicals (1339), Maxis (1441), Petronas Gas (1485), IOI Group (1559) and YTL (1589).

Criteria for the ranking include sales, profits, assets and market value.

Sixty-eight companies from South-East Asia are on the Forbes list, with Singaporean firms accounting for 20.

The top 10 Asean companies are Indonesia state-owned oil and gas company PTT PCL (225), DBS Group (268), Oversea-Chinese Banking (302), Singapore Telecommunications (325), United Overseas Bank (348), Wilmar (369). Maybank (371), Tenaga (408), Bank Rakyat Indonesia (457) and Bank Mandiri (490).

The world’s biggest public companies are Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan Chase, Exxon Mobil, PetroChina, General Electric and Wells Fargo.

ICBC has sales of US$166.8bil (RM599.4bil), profit of US$44.8bil (RM161bil), assets of US$3.322 trillion (RM11.935 trillion) and market value of US$278.3bil (RM999.9bil).

The top five country breakdown is as follows: the US (579 companies), China/Hong Kong (232), Japan (218), the UK (94) and South Korea (66).

Forbes said in a statement that China housed the world’s four biggest companies and landed five of the top 10 spots for the second year in a row.

In total, the Global 2000 companies account for US$39 trillion (RM140 trillion) in revenues, US$3 trillion (RM10.8 trillion) in profits, US$162 trillion (RM582 trillion) in assets and US$48 trillion (RM172.5 trillion) in market value in 2015. Total market value grew 9% year-on-year, the most among the four metrics.