Fortune Magazine on Monday announced its 26th annual list of “America’s Most Admired Companies.” This year Apple tops the list, rising six places from 2007. Apple beat out Berkshire Hathaway and General Electric to top the list.
Fortune and its survey partner Hay Group start with the Fortune 1,000 list as a baseline, which ranks the 1,000 largest U.S. companies by revenue, then sort them by industry and select the ten largest companies in each. They then ask executives, directors and analysts to rate companies in their own industry on eight criteria ranging from investment value to social responsibility.
The top 20 list is culled from the responses submitted by 3,721 executives, directors and security analysts who had responded to the surveys to select the ten companies they admired the most. They chose from a list comprising the companies that ranked in the top 25 percent in the 2007 survey, plus those that finished in the top 20 percent in their industry.
The full results appear online now. They’ll also be in the March 17th edition of Fortune, which hits newsstands on March 10th.