By Angela Kiara S. Brillantes, Special Features and Content Writer

BUSINESSWORLD, the country’s leading and most trusted business news source, consistently provides information on how the country’s corporations and industries are performing, from the latest developments about their products, services, and initiatives to their gross revenues, net sales, and incomes.

A constant indicator of the latter is BusinessWorld Top 1000 Corporations in the Philippines, the brand’s long-running annual publication that provides the latest financial information on the country’s leading companies.

“Since its first outing in 1969, back when Business Day (BusinessWorld’s predecessor) published the Top 500, the magazine’s methodology barely changed. We still mainly rank the Philippines’ stock corporations by gross revenues. We also provide separate rankings for net sales and net income (or loss),” Mark T. Amoguis, BusinessWorld’s research head, said in an e-mail. “BusinessWorld expanded the list when it released the Top 500 and the Next 500 in 1987. The magazine was finally rebranded to BusinessWorld Top 1000 Corporations in the Philippines in the 1996 edition.”

“BusinessWorld has been consistently providing its readers with unrivaled and trusted data for the country’s largest corporations for almost 40 years. Its readers, which includes students, policy makers, as well as businessmen and women, have used the data from our annual publication for their own use,” he added.

Part of what makes Top 1000 a reliable source that the Philippine business community awaits each year is the rigorous and thorough methodology the publication utilizes in every issue.

The financial data used in the magazine, both for the parent companies and conglomerates, are gathered from stock corporations’ audited financial statements (AFS) that were submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the publicly listed companies’ annual reports from the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE), and the government-owned and -controlled stock corporations’ AFS from the Commission on Audit.

“By comparing only parent companies, BusinessWorld provides an accurate picture of individual companies (or segmented units of a conglomerate) in the country. Comparing parent or standalone companies and conglomerates side by side in one single ranking may result in double-counting, or worse: a distorted comparison between apples and a truckload of apples and oranges,” Mr. Amoguis previously said.

The methodology and computation were validated and verified by the country’s leading auditing firms, making the data ten times more trusted and more reliable.

Since 2021, despite the strong battle against the pandemic, the global economy has seen the light as it recovers. The 2022 edition of Top 1000 demonstrated how the corporate sector has been consistently bouncing back to recovery.

For instance, as BusinessWorld reported earlier this year, the top 1,000 corporations are found to have hit a total of P13.44 trillion of combined gross revenues, increasing by 17.5% from the P11.44 trillion posted during the height of the pandemic in 2020. This was the fastest gross revenue growth since 2001, which was recorded at 24.4%.

“After the decline suffered by many companies at the height of the lockdowns imposed to contain the coronavirus pandemic in the country, the 2022 edition — which used the 2021 financial statements — saw these firms slowly bouncing back (both in terms of sales and profits) as the movement restrictions were eased,” Mr. Amoguis said.

The most recent edition of Top 1000 also noted the surge in the combined net income of the top corporations at 121.5% — from P820.7 billion in 2020 to P1.82 trillion in that year. This was the biggest profit growth since 2005, which was recorded at 160.3%.

Moreover, the latest Top 1000 ranks Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) as the Philippines’ top corporation with the highest gross revenue, having tallied P292.09 billion, increasing by 9.8% since 2020.

Second in ranking is Petron Corp., with a gross revenue rise of 34.3% to P240.94 billion; while Pilipinas Shell Petroleum Corp. (PSPC), climbed to three spots to third place with its 13.4% increase in revenue to P179.18 billion.

Completing the top 10 corporations were BDO Unibank, Inc.; PMFTC, Inc.; Mercury Drug Corp.; Globe Telecom, Inc.; Toshiba Information Equipment (Philippines), Inc.; Philippine Associated Smelting and Refining Corp.; and Nestlé Philippines, Inc.

In addition to the main top 1,000 list, the publication also provides a separate ranking of the top 200 consolidated corporations. In this list, San Miguel Corp. (SMC) and its subsidiaries rank first with a total of P983.75 billion in gross revenue, increasing up to 27.2% in the previous year. The largest shareholder of SMC, Top Frontier Investment Holdings, Inc., came in second, increasing to 26.9% with gross revenue of P982.69 billion. Taking third place is Petron and its subsidiaries, with a 51.8% year-on-year increase, totaling P440.66 billion in revenue.

Completing this particular list were SM Investments Corp. and subsidiaries, Meralco and subsidiaries, San Miguel Food and Beverage, Inc. and subsidiaries, Ayala Corp. and subsidiaries, Aboitiz Equity Ventures, Inc. and subsidiaries, JG Summit Holdings, Inc. and subsidiaries, and BDO Unibank and subsidiaries.

With the most recent edition having painted a picture of the Philippine economy’s gradual bounce back from the pandemic, the upcoming Top 1000 issue for 2023 is seen to continue the narrative of regaining from the losses of previous years.

“As we start the production for the 2023 edition of the Top 1000, we can expect that Philippines, Inc. to further regain their footing lost during the pandemic. Stay tuned,” Mr. Amoguis said.

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