Every year Forbes Magazine offers the Forbes 500, a “report card” on how America’s biggest companies performed. The list is a complex collection of metrics that purports to evaluate the size of corporations based not only on sales, but also on profits, assets and market value. As with any such compilation, the result should be taken with a grain of salt, but it helps to provide one possible yardstick for investors to measure by.
This time around, Apple has dropped from 289 to 381. Forbes acknowledged that 2002 was “another nasty year,” with aggregate profits of the collected companies by sales off 5 percent.
All told, Apple ranked 285th for sales, with a non-ranking for profits as the company posted an aggregate loss for the year. For assets the company ranked 443 on the last, with an overall market value ranking of 301.
Some other PC manufacturers fared better. Dell Computer placed number 50 on the list, with sales, profits, assets and market value ranked 35, 41, 217 and 22 on the list respectively. IBM, however, pulled in an impress number 9 listing overall, ranked 8th in sales, 23rd in profits, 35th in assets and 8th in market value. Beleaguered Gateway Computer was nowhere in the 500, clocking in at 632.