The 12 months of 2011 were an exhilarating ride for Apple of Cupertino, Calif. It went through a major leadership transition after the company lost its cofounder Steve Jobs and op-chief Tim Cook took the reigns and appointed several new executives. The iPhone 4S became a huge success and pushed Apple’s market capitalization above the half a trillion-dollar valuation.
Editors at Fortune magazine did not have second thoughts when ranking Apple first on its annual list of World’s Most Admired Companies due to the company’s impending iPad 3 unveiling, off-the-chart sales, and beautiful new retail stores like the upcoming Amsterdam outlet. Seasonal product refreshes and new rumored gizmos (of which an Apple-branded HD TV television set is conceivably everyone’s favorite) helped Apple garner the spot, as well. Mind you, Apple earned this coveted title for five years in a row.
Here’s from the publication’s editors:
Following Apple’s trail is the second-ranked Internet giant Google (No. 1 in Internet Services and Retailing last year). It is another Silicon Valley darling that went through a transition in 2011 as Eric Schmidt passed the CEO reins to cofounder Larry Page in April. Page co-founded Google with Sergey Brin and quickly re-instituted startup mentality that calls for “moon shots” while streamlining the company’s operations.
Here’s Fortune’s methodology:
The Most Admired list is the definitive report card on corporate reputations. Our survey partners at Hay Group started with approximately 1,400 companies: the Fortune 1,000 (the 1,000 largest U.S. companies ranked by revenue), non-U.S. companies in Fortune’sGlobal 500 database with revenue of $10 billion or more, and the top foreign companies operating in the U.S.
They then sorted the companies by industry and selected the 15 largest for each international industry and the 10 largest for each U.S. industry. A total of 698 companies from 32 countries were surveyed. (Due to an insufficient response rate, the results for 11 companies in the scientific, photographic, and control equipment industry were not published. In addition, due to the distribution of responses, only the aggregate scores and ranks for the 10 companies in the oil and gas equipment/services industry were published.) To create the 58 industry lists, Hay asked executives, directors, and analysts to rate companies in their own industry on nine criteria, from investment value to social responsibility. This year only the best are listed: A company’s score must rank in the top half of its industry survey.
To arrive at the top 50 Most Admired Companies overall, the Hay Group asked 3,855 executives, directors, and securities analysts who had responded to the industry surveys to select the 10 companies they admired most. They chose from a list made up of the companies that ranked in the top 25% in last year’s surveys, plus those that finished in the top 20% of their industry. Anyone could vote for any company in any industry. The difference in the voting rolls is why some results can seem anomalous—for example, although FedEx is one of the top 10 Most Admired Companies, it is second in the Delivery industry behind top-ranked UPS, which ranked 29th on the top 50 overall.
