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Fortune 500 List Shows Divides in Tech Industry

When it comes to tech, the annual Fortune magazine ranking of the largest global companies shows Apple, Amazon.com and Google on the march, others stumbling around in a single-digit growth range, and a third group suffering falling revenues.

Fortune released its Fortune 500 list today. Among the top 100 companies on the list are 14 names crucial to the channel: Apple (rank 6), HP (15), Verizon Communications (16), IBM (20), Microsoft (35), Amazon.com (49), Dell (51), Intel (54), Google (55), Cisco Systems (60), Best Buy (61), Ingram Micro (76), Oracle (80) and Sprint Nextel (87). (Fortune's headline ranking depends on a company's annual revenues.)

For Apple, the sixth-place ranking is the company's first time to crack the Top 10. Fortune put the company's revenues at $156 billion for the list, with growth of 44.6 percent. That was good for a jump in rank from 17th last year that vaulted Apple past tech rivals HP and Verizon Communications.

Other big winners in 2012 were Google with 38 percent revenue growth and a huge jump in placement from 73rd to 55th, and Amazon with 27 percent revenue growth and a leap from 56th to 49th place.

The single-digit growth tier included Verizon (4.5 percent), Microsoft (5.4 percent), Cisco (6.6 percent), Ingram Micro (4.1 percent), Oracle (4.2 percent) and Sprint Nextel (4.9 percent).

Perhaps the biggest story of the Fortune 100 in tech is the drops. In Fortune's main article summarizing the year's list, the only tech company that earns a mention is HP. Shawn Tully, Fortune senior-editor-at-large, called HP's swing from a $7.1 billion profit in 2011 to a $12.7 billion loss in 2012 "the 26th worst in Fortune 500 history." Tully explained to Fortune readers that the reason for the loss was "two disastrous acquisitions" -- Autonomy and Electronic Data Systems.

For all that, HP's revenues only dropped 5.4 percent from 2011 to 2012. Dell saw its ranking fall seven places on a revenue drop of 8.3 percent and Best Buy, which has made several runs at the channel in the small business market, fell eight places and had a revenue slide of 11.8 percent.

Other Fortune 100 tech companies with revenue drops were IBM (- 2.3 percent) and Intel (- 1.2 percent).

Posted by Scott Bekker on May 06, 2013


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