Sometimes it takes removing oneself from the familiar context of the current day to realize just how much the world has evolved.
Each year, Fortune publishes its flagship Fortune 500 list (U.S. companies only) approximately two months prior to its Global 500 . (This timing is largely determined by when companies report their financial performance following the end of their fiscal years.) Given that many of the world’s largest companies by revenue are American, the upper echelons of the Global list often echo the American domestic list published a few weeks prior. Most recently, Walmart has been No. 1 on both lists, year after year, and U.S. companies on the Global list appear in largely the same order as they do on the domestic list, with non-U.S. companies scattered in between. Trends such as which sectors dominate are similarly parallel.
Still, there are always shifts and surprises, which is why Fortune runs each of these lists annually. And the further you look back in time, the more interesting those shifts become.
When Fortune published the first list with the title “Global 500” in 1990 , West and East Germany were still two separate nations. China, now regularly in competition with the U.S. for the highest total number of Global 500 companies, was not even among the top 10 countries in 1990 by that measure. There were 167 U.S. companies on the 1990 list, 111 Japanese companies, and in a distant third was Britain, with 43 .
Fortune began publishing an international list of the largest companies by revenue in 1976, but U.S. and non-U.S. companies didn’t occupy the same list until the Global 500 debuted in 1990. Then in 1995 , as I discussed in my July 2 edition of this newsletter, Fortune intermingled industrial and service corporations on both of the 500 lists for the first time. To see how the Global 500 has changed over time, let’s peek back into the archives at the pages of Fortune that detailed the Global 500 in both 1990 and 1995.