Forbes Global 2000

The Forbes Global 2000 - is an annual ranking of the top 2000 public companies in the world by Forbes magazine. The ranking is based on a mix of four metrics: Sales, Profit, Assets and Market value. The list is published since 2003.
The Forbes Global 2000 is a useful indicator of which are the leading public companies in the world, but it is only an interpretation, as only public companies are listed. The results are not definitive; any change to the criteria would produce a different list.

Exclusions and inconsistencies
As the list is published early in the calendar year, Forbes has to use out of date information for the many non U.S companies which have year ends early in the calendar year, including Japanese companies, which all have 31 March year ends. No adjustments are made to reflect different accounting practices in different countries, which leads to some major anomalies. For example Vodafone is ranked 377 in the 2005 list due to losses created by huge writedowns of purchased goodwill, but if amortisation of purchased goodwill were not charged against statutory profits in the UK, it would be in the top 20. It should also be noted that wholly state-owned corporations are excluded because no market valuation exists and in some cases accounts are not publicly available either. Some of these state companies would rank highly if they were eligible, for example the national oil companies of some of the OPEC countries.