At first glance, the business world may seem quite static.
The biggest companies today – ones like Apple, Walmart, or Exxon Mobil – will likely also be some of the biggest companies tomorrow. Fast forward a week, a month, or a year, and odds are that they will still be at the top of the food chain.
But fast forward any further, and those odds change considerably. In a decade, there just has to be one bad strategic decision, a missed trend, or a colossal managerial mistake, and you have the next Kodak, Blockbuster, or Sears.
A Changing List
Every year, Fortune publishes a ranking of the world’s top companies by revenue.
We compared the 100 highest revenue companies in both 2008 and 2018 to see how much things change in ten years – and the results are pretty astounding.
The most fundamental finding: 43 of the 100 companies on top of today’s list were not there ten years ago. Some of the “new” entries, like Amazon or Huawei, are to be expected – but other companies like Microsoft or Apple are more surprising.
In 2008, for example, Apple was ranked just #337 in global revenue, and today it comes in 11th place.
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