How far is China's top 500 from world's top 500?
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2005-08-23 14:17

The Chinese Federation of Enterprises (CFE) issued the list of China's top 500 companies in 2005 Sunday, showcasing the mainstays of the national economy.

It is China's sole authoritative list evaluating the comprehensive capabilities of domestic companies, employing exactly the same criteria with those in assessing the world top 500 by the Fortune Magazine.

Yet viewing from all the major indexes, one can see that there exist huge gaps between this Chinese bloc and Fortune's world top 500.

China's top 500 are greatly inferior to their world's counterparts in terms of scale, productivity, profit-making capacity, managing capacity and competitiveness, said CFE Chairman Chen Jinhua. "China's enterprises still have a long way to go in participating in global competition," he added.

According to CFE statistics, the gross business income, profits and assets of China's top 500 just account for 8.4 percent, 7.0 percent and 6.0 percent of the world's top 500 respectively.

Experts say that behind the numerical gaps, there are gaps in systems, mechanisms and comprehensive competitiveness.

"Quite obviously, the competitiveness of China's enterprises does not match its rapidly growing economy," said Chen.

The first eight companies of China's top 500 are corporations in the monopolized fields, for instance, petroleum, power and steel, but most of the world's top 500 companies belong to the competitive fields like the automotive industry, said Liu Jisheng, professor of Tsinghua University's economic management school.

Apart from that, the majority of the world's top 500 companies are privately run like Wal-Mart, but quite a proportion of China's leading enterprises are State-owned, said the professor.

Even some modern service trades in China including telecommunications, civil aviation, railroad transportation and post services are controlled by the state.

So far, many China's large enterprises have not shaken off their long-term dependence upon the government rather than the market, said Liu.

A comfort to the situation, China sees a soaring number of private companies every year.

The CFE's list shows that 15.8 percent of China's top 500 companies are privately owned, with the per capita asset profit margin, asset turnover and business income much higher than their State-owned counterparts.

Another major problem that keeps Chinese companies behind foreign companies, experts say, is that China's leading companies lack their own intellectual property rights and key technologies due to insufficient input in research.

As the modern industrial monopoly has already turned from the domain of capital to technology, merely one fifth of China's top 500 invest more than 2 percent of their sales income in research and development of new technology and products.

Besides, few Chinese companies attempt to internationalize their business, said Liu.

China's total direct investment in foreign countries amounted to US$37 billion till the end of 2004, only 6.58 percent of total foreign direct investment in China.

Even the overseas sales of Haier Group, a Chinese household appliance giant famous for its international market management, reached merely US$1 billion last year, less than 8 percent of its total yearly sales.

Experts propose that China should adjust its unbalanced industrial structure, which is currently dominated by the energy-consuming and pollutive heavy industries.

Shi Chunsheng, president of Tianjin Pharmaceutical Group, one of China's top 500, said Chinese enterprises should employ a sustainable and energy-saving development mode instead of the extensive one.

This the social responsibility of big enterprises, he said.

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