5 killer facts about the fortune 500

The original 2011 post running the numbers on the Fortune 500's own profit and loss data, restored from the Wayback Machine.

Published by Sudhanshu on May 16, 2011

Recovered from a dead backlink. Restored from a 2015 Wayback Machine snapshot, close to verbatim.


5 killer facts about the fortune 500

Posted 16 May 2011

The fortune 500 is a really cool list to be in. It's the super list of heavyweights of the American economy.

Being an entrepreneur, I always keep hearing about issues faced by startups and what you should do to make sure that you don't go into the red. So today I thought about trying out a few of my number processing skills with the Fortune 500 list, and the results were really interesting!

Here are some of the interesting ones:

  1. 50 out of 498 which reported their profit/loss figures were in a loss. That's about 10.04%
  2. Among the profitable ones, the average profit margin was 8.00%
  3. 122 out of 498 (one fourth – 24.5%) had a profit margins of less than 2%
  4. The combined revenue of all 500 was 10,737,356.8 million USD. To put it in perspective, it's about 8 times India's GDP, a little over twice that of China's, 3 quarters of that of the US, and 2000 times that of Rwanda!
  5. Corning has the highest profit margin – 54%

Here's the complete list, do let me know what do you think?