Three Nigerian banks – First Bank of Nigeria Plc, United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc and Intercontinental Bank Plc – have made the Forbes list of top 2000 world biggest companies.
The trio, according to Forbes Magazine, are joining 248 other companies around the world to displace same number of companies that featured on the list in the 2008 ranking.
For Nigeria, the listing of these banks on the current Global 2000 is a cause for cheers. First Bank Plc is ranked at 1,375, while the UBA comes on the list at number 1,560. Intercontinental Bank Plc completes Nigeria’s showing at 1,798.
Explaining the methodology adopted in arriving at the final compilation of the 2000 biggest companies, Forbes said that companies must have a publicity traded stock in order to qualify for the Global 2000. The Global 2000 companies have the top composite scores based on sales, profit, assets and market value.
First Bank Plc’s composite score on the four metric measures shows a sales figure of $1.29 billion, a profit stated at $0.31 billion, assets metric calculated at 413.05 billion and market value stated at $2.89 billion.
The UBA’s sales figure was stated at $1.44 billion with profit at $0.35 billion while its assets stood at $14.22 billion and its market value calculated at 41.43 billion.
Intercontinental Bank Plc incredibly returned a higher sales figure than the other two Nigerian banks on the list with its $1.48 billion position and a profit position of $0.29 billion with assets calculated at $11.90 billion and market value adding up to $0.88 billion.
This appears to be a confirmation of the 2009 global banking industry, which listed the three banks among top 500 banks in the world.
The global banking industry research and ratings for 2009 had listed First Bank of Nigeria Plc, Intercontinental Bank Plc, Union Bank of Nigeria Plc, Zenith Bank Plc and United Bank for Africa Plc on the world’s top 500 banking brands by the Banker magazine, a publication of the Financial Times of London.
Nigerian banks made their first showing on the world’s top 500 banks in 2007 when Intercontinental Bank came number 355 on the list while also emerging the fastest growing bank in the world. The bank has since then made the list moving up in 2008 to 334.
The three banks in Nigeria that made this year’s list had emerged as industry leaders consistently since after the banking industry reforms introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in 2004.
Factors accounting for the drop off of the companies that were on the 2008 list but could not make the list in the 2009 ranking, according to Forbes, include mergers, weak financial performance and outright failure.
For instance, Forbes noted that the former 97th-largest company in the world, Lehman Brothers, fell into bankruptcy, while the weakness in the financial markets led to governments nationalising some big banks, such as Ireland’s Anglo Irish banks and Iceland’s Kaupthing Bank.
Speaking on the report, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said: “Even a depression is a place for opportunity if you have cash, scale and ambition. Many of the names on this year’s Forbes Global 2000 list of the world's biggest companies will emerge on the other side of the trough far stronger when world economies snap back next year. For the strong corporations, there are rivals to buy, technologies to fund and new markets to enter - all at lower prices than we've seen in years.
“Despite the economy, it’s important to think about what is possible.''
Forbes’ ranking of the world’s biggest companies departs from lopsided lists based on a single metric, like sales.
Instead, it uses an equal weighting of sales, profits, assets and market value to rank companies according to size. This year's list reveals the dynamism of global business. “The rankings span 62 countries, with the U.S. still dominant with 551 members, but that is 200 fewer than in 2004, when we first published this global list,” Forbes said.
Source:
Thisday Newspaper
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