Six Indian cos among BusinessWeek's top 100 Infotech firms

NEW DELHI: Notwithstanding the turmoil in global economic environment, as many as six Indian firms, including Reliance Comm and Bharti Airtel, have been named among top 100 best-performing infotech companies in the world by a US magazine BusinessWeek.

The BusinessWeek's latest annual list 'The Infotech 100', which ranks the firms on the basis of shareholder return, return on equity, total revenues and revenue growth, has ranked telecom major Bharti Airtel at the 21st position followed by Reddington India (55th) and RCom (66th).

The list is topped by US firms --Amazon.com and Apple-- who have taken the top two spots this year. However, the magazine said in an accompanying report that "the dominance of US companies is in decline, the country has 33 companies among the IT 100 this year, down from 43 in 2007."

Other Indian firms on the list, includes -- Azim Premji-led Wipro at the 74th position, Satyam at 91 rank and HCL Technologies has been ranked at the 95th position among the list of 100 firms.

South African telecom firm MTN Group, which is in exclusive talks with Anil Ambani Group flagship firm Reliance Communications, has been ranked at the 12th position in the global list even ahead of global IT giants IBM and Microsoft, which are at 13th and 23rd ranks in the list, respectively.

Besides, the other fast emerging country China also has six companies among the top 100 Infotech companies in the world.

The magazine has compiled the information for the list by sorting through the financial results of 30,500 publicly traded companies and has ranked the technology players on four criteria --shareholder return, return on equity, total revenues and revenue growth.

The companies leading the list are those with the lowest aggregate ranking.

The companies which qualified had to have revenues of at least 300 million dollar then the collection of about 800 companies was divided into eight industry categories, such as software and semiconductors.

"Companies whose stock price has dropped more than 75 per cent, whose sales shrank, or where other developments raised questions about future performance were eliminated from contention.

"We also dropped some phone companies whose monopoly or near-monopoly power gives them an unfair advantage over competitors," the magazine added.

The Economic times 11 7 2008