In the last edition of Fortune Analytics, two weeks ago, we looked back at how the Fortune 500 changed in 1995, integrating “service” companies (think banks, retailers, utilities) for the first time in a list that previously had featured only “industrial” corporations.
The growth in scope of the ranking means that today, it includes companies across 21 sectors, from Aerospace and Defense to Wholesalers. To drill down deeper and examine the biggest players in these sectors, Fortune today has introduced our first collection of Fortune Sector Leaders rankings.
We’ve highlighted, or reranked, the top companies by annual revenue within 19 of those sectors—the better to show who’s at the top of each field within the business world.
The number of companies, or cutoff, for each Sector Leaders list differs based on the total number of companies in that sector. So for example, there are more financials-sector companies on the Fortune 1000 than there are chemicals-sector companies, so the Financials Sector Leaders includes 50 companies, while Chemicals Sector Leaders features a total of 15. And we did not break out separate Sector Leaders lists for food and drug stores, nor for telecommunications—those two sectors each have only nine companies, which isn’t enough to warrant spinoff rankings, in our view. (Not everyone gets a trophy!)
The Fortune 500 is our iconic brand highlighting America’s largest companies by revenue, but each spring, we actually publish a Fortune 1000. You might think of the Fortune 500 as the tip of the iceberg, with the rest of the 1000 looming underneath. Many of the companies that rank No. 501–1000 in any given year are waiting in the wings to crash into the main list and usurp their competitors. All of this is to say: Many of the Sector Leaders are companies that did not crack the Fortune 500 this year, but still merit being featured on a Fortune list.
