Fortune magazine has its annual "Fortune 500" issue out, April 29 1996. There isn't much in there that we did not cover in morevalue.com April 8, 1996. But there are a lot of errors in the articles which I will point some out in the "Bloopers & Blunders" section. Nevertheless, I wanted to draw your attention to few issues:

1. Value, in the article, is calculated as:
   value = (market price of the stock) x (number of shares outstanding)
2. Value is also commonly referred to as market capitalization.
3. Keep in mind that in finance textbooks company value includes both the market value of stock as well as market value of debt. It is the market value not book value that is relevant in financial decision making.

Q There is a minor discrepancy between value rankings of Fortune and Business Week. Can you think of a possible reason?

Ans One possible explanation is that the time period might be different. Fortune, for example, provides other statistics for 1995. Presumably they are using closing market price for the stock at the end of 1995. My hunch is that Business Week used more recent data.

You can find more details on these compnaies at Fortune's special issue.