Sometimes we need to remove ourselves from our modern familiar contexts to appreciate how much the world has evolved.
Each year, Fortune releases its flagship Fortune 500 list (US companies only) about two months before the Global 500 (the timing is largely dependent on when companies report their financial results after the fiscal year ends). Since many of the world's largest companies by revenue are US companies, the top of the Global list closely resembles the US national list, which is released a few weeks earlier. Recently, Walmart has topped both lists every year, and US companies on the Global list appear in roughly the same order as the US national list, with non-US companies scattered throughout. Trends such as which sectors dominate are similar as well.
Still, there are always changes and surprises — that's why Fortune publishes the list every year — and the further back we look, the more interesting the changes become.
When Fortune magazine published its first “Global 500” list in 1990, West Germany and East Germany were still separate countries. China, which now regularly competes with the United States for the number of companies on the Global 500, wasn't even in the top 10 by that measure in 1990. The 1990 list had 167 American companies, 111 Japanese companies, and the United Kingdom in a distant third with 43.
Fortune magazine began publishing a list of the world's largest companies by revenue in 1976, but it wasn't until the Global 500 debuted in 1990 that U.S. and non-U.S. companies appeared on the same list. Then, as we explained in the July 2 issue of this newsletter, in 1995 Fortune first mixed industrial and service companies on both 500 lists. To see how the Global 500 has changed over time, take a peek through the pages of Fortune's archives, which detail the 1990 and 1995 Global 500 lists.
Numbers to know
14… The number of industries in which U.S. companies ranked highest among the Global 500 in 1990. IBM (#5) was top in computers, General Electric (#7) in electronics, and Boeing (#45) in aerospace.
$126.97 billion…that's General Motors' 1989 revenue (released in 1990), the first Global 500 company to rank number one, and compares to GM's current revenue of $171.84 billion (not adjusted for inflation).
167 companies…the number of US companies ranked in the Global 500 in 1990. There were 111 Japanese companies.
In 1995, there were 151 U.S. companies on the Global 500 list, compared with 149 Japanese companies. The addition of service companies meant that many Japanese companies made the list for the first time, with six of the top ten companies making the list.
There are 40 Japanese companies on the 2024 Global 500 list, 139 American companies, and 133 Greater China companies.
728,944 people… that's how many people the US Postal Service employed 30 years ago, when it was named one of the “largest employers” in the 1995 Global 500 rankings, ranking 33rd. Today, the USPS employs 582,781 people. Walmart, the largest employer on the 2024 list, employs 2.1 million people.
$6.2 billion…Royal Dutch Shell's profits (in 1994 dollars) made it the most profitable company in the Global 500 in the 1995 list. Currently, another oil company, Saudi Aramco, is the most profitable, making $121 billion in profits last year.
$2.48 billion…revenues for the 500th company on the 1990 list (DAF Trucks, 1989 dollars). $7.84 billion on the 1995 list (Toyo Seikan Co., Ltd., 1994 dollars), and $32.08 billion on the 2024 list (Samsung C&T, 2023 dollars).
The big picture
“The global village is now truly upon us, looking more like a global industrial complex,” Fortune reporters Jong Ah Park and Sally Solo wrote in their inaugural Global 500 article in the July 30, 1990 issue. “We live in a vast, economically interconnected new world where business thrives across borders and time zones.” These descriptions may seem quaint and cliché today, but to the staff of Fortune at the time, it marked the dawn of a new era: the globalization of business had finally arrived, the end of the Cold War would soon give way to the founding of the European Union and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the dot-com boom was on the horizon.
The companies themselves were becoming more global, not just in terms of trade and manufacturing, but through expansion through mergers and acquisitions: by 1995, deputy editor Rahul Jacob claimed that that year's list was “probably the most global 500 ever”, citing the fact that one in seven Boeing aircraft was sold to a Chinese airline.
Deeper lessons
Japan's performance is mixed
While the U.S. economy boomed in the mid-1990s, with GDP growth reaching 4.1% in 1994, Japan's economy languished at just 0.6%. At the time, Japan was in the early stages of a decades-long recession. Still, buoyed by the momentum they had built during the boom years of the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese companies ranked among the world's top companies in terms of sales that year. In 1995, there were almost as many Japanese companies as U.S. companies on the Global 500, making up more than half of the top 10.
Mitsubishi, ranked No. 1 in 1995, is No. 65 on the 2024 list. An August 7, 1995 article in Fortune magazine cited Mitsubishi's “big sales but tiny profits” and a headline saying analysts see the company as “an outdated, sluggish prehistoric monster,” questioning whether the company had a future. The article similarly rated Mitsui (No. 2), Itochu (No. 3), Sumitomo (No. 4), Marubeni (No. 6), and Nissho Iwai (No. 9).
The exchange rate made Japanese companies appear more successful than they were at the time: “38 companies whose revenues actually fell when denominated in yen saw revenues rise when viewing their results in dollars on our list,” Fortune's Jacob explained.
A new era for automakers
Volkswagen earned the title of “largest automaker” in the 2024 Global 500, ranking 11th, and appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine's European edition of the August/September 2024 issue. However, in the 1990 list, Volkswagen was 21st, and there were seven companies ranked higher than Volkswagen in the automobile and parts industry.
General Motors ranked first on the first Fortune 500 in 1955 and maintained that position into 1990. Ford Motor Company ranked second in 1990. Japanese rivals, a few places lower on the list, made impressive progress, occupying higher positions in the first Global 500. In 1990, Toyota Motor Corporation ranked sixth, Nissan Motor Corporation ranked 17th, and Honda Motor Company ranked 30th. These companies especially capitalized on the domestic and US sports car markets, with Nissan's revenues increasing 23% over the previous year, and Toyota and Honda each increasing 19%. By 1995, Nissan (23rd) had surpassed Chrysler (29th).
Fast forward to 2024 and the three biggest companies are Volkswagen, Toyota Motor Corp. at 15th and, after a series of mergers (the combination of Italy's Fiat, Chrysler and France's PSA Group), the company now known as Stellantis, at 28th. Nissan has dropped to 136th, Honda at 57th, General Motors at 39th and Ford at 36th.
Lydia Belanger
Fortune Production Director
[email protected]
