Harry Henry, founder of Global5000 reports: “As the year 2019 comes to a close, it is a good time to take a step back and look at the year in some numbers and the major trends we are seeing in the data.”

First, with a couple weeks left in the year, thru 2019 we will have updated approximately 5,300 company records and added over 230 new companies. As we have always stated, this is a continual process that is often driven by M&A activity where mergers join two companies and then often cause spin-offs later in the process. And this leads to the first of our trends.

Major trends we see by working on all these records include:

  • Big continue striving for bigger. Size matters and acquisitions fuel that size need. Merger and acquisition activity is something we watch every day and major sales & marketing operations need to do so as well. It is particularly important for those products that are sold at the corporate/enterprise level. Most data in CRM systems won’t be updated as the acquisitions happen and then new businesses are spun off. Keeping track is a time consuming effort. One great example is Dow & DuPont – two separate companies that merged. Then it was determined it would split into 3 companies. Dow was then split off with some number of the business units.  Most recently, DuPont will be merging one of its business units with International Flavors & Fragrances.  And you can expect more.
  • China – is #2 in the number of companies in the Global 5000 and they are growing faster than any other country. We read reports of how their growth rate is slowing – but that is compared to previous China years. It is still much faster than anywhere else. The implication here is that more of this big company market may not be that available to others as many China markets are not always open to companies from outside China.
  • Mirroring GDP – The big guys (Global 5000 companies) revenue breakdown by country closely parallels GDP by country and is a good guide for estimating geographic revenue. we’ve done a number of tests over the years comparing revenue of Global 5000 companies and GDP growth by country and there is a strong correlation. The old axiom – follow the money definitely applies.

In our every day work, we seem to have a number of requests and counts that are requested on a regular basis. Some of them are listed here with the counts:

  • How many Global 5000 companies are in the auto & auto parts industry – 140
  • How many Pharma/Biotech firms compared to Medical Equipment companies are in the database — 110 vs 54
  • The number of companies in the BeneLux countries – 105
  • The number of private companies – 1,081 with 616 of those in the US
  • How many companies are in China compared to Japan – 485 vs 382
  • How many employees work for Global 5000 companies — 157 million or almost the size of the US labor force.

For more data and information about the Global 5000 database, visit the web site.

Source:  Harry Henry, The Global 5000