A TOTAL of 18 firms with headquarters in Shenzhen found their names among China’s top 500 enterprises in 2009 released Saturday by the China Enterprise Confederation (CEC) and China Enterprise Directors Association.
The Shenzhen-based Ping An Insurance, one of the country’s most profitable life insurance companies, was placed at 38 on the list, the highest ranking for Shenzhen firms. It was followed by Huawei at 44, China Merchants Bank at 96, ZTE at 133 and Vanke at 150.
Meanwhile, three Shenzhen firms — Huawei and ZTE, China’ leading telecom service providers, and Tencent, one of China’s largest Internet service portals — swept the first three places in the category for innovation.
According to the report, profits of the top 500 enterprises in China exceeded that of their counterparts in the United States for the first time in history.
Net profit for the Chinese companies totaled US$170.6 billion in the first half of this year, while the figure for the U.S. companies was US$98.9 billion.
Although net profit for the Chinese heavyweights was down 12.4 percent from a year ago, it was still less than the 84.67 percent fall for U.S. companies, which was the worst decline in 55 years according to figures recorded by the U.S. magazine, Fortune.
Wang Jiming, vice president of CEC, said Chinese companies still lagged behind the world’s leading enterprises in resource allocation, innovation, international presence, business model and corporate culture.
The threshold for this year’s top 500 companies in China was raised to 10.54 billion yuan (US$1.55 billion) for sales revenue, compared with last year’s 9.31 billion yuan. (SD-Xinhua)