Editing Forbes 500 (section)

==Quantifying the largest companies==
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Various methods exist in determining the largest corporations.  Forbes Magazine, for example, takes into consideration profit, revenue, market capitalization, and value of assets when ranking companies by size; the magnitude of any one of these factors alone may not necessarily be indicative of a firm's overall ranking.

The value of a firm's [[assets]] is typically derived from a company's ability to generate cash via its ownership and control of inputs and/or distribution of the final product. Banks and financial institutions, for example, tend to have a large number of assets due to loans and investments, however, a large portion of these do not actually belong to the firm since these assets are customers' deposits.

[[Fortune 500]] ranks companies by revenue. This method is heavily biased towards distributors such as [[Walmart]], which may have a high volume of sales but may be operating on very thin [[profit margin]]s.

Another method might be to look at the [[market capitalization]] of the company. However, this price is dictated by the perceived value of the company and its prospects. At one point in the late nineties, [[Cisco Systems]] would have been the biggest company by this measure, however the [[dot-com bubble]] crash reduced its perceived value dramatically. Another example would be [[Amazon.com]], which despite being barely profitable, has a very large market cap rivaling or exceeded established American companies due to the general market sentiment about its innovations.