US retail giant Wal-Mart, with 1.5 million employees, has topped the Fortune Global 500 biggest firms in
2003 for the third straight year, with Britain's BP taking second spot.
Wal-Mart, the discount chain with revenues up 7% at $263 billion and a workforce swelling 100,000 to 1.5 million, led a pack of 189 American companies in the top 500, Fortune said.
But Wal-Mart's profits, which jumped 13% to $9.1 billion last year, were not the largest.
Not counting MCI, the number 168 company, which emerged from bankruptcy with a 'paper profit' of $22.2 billion, Texan oil giant Exxon Mobil was the most profitable with net profit of $21.5 billion. Citigroup was second with $17.9 billion.
Over the past decade, the number of American companies in the Global 500 rose from 151 to 189, Japanese companies slumped from 149 to 82, and Chinese companies rose from three to 15. In the past year alone, the number of Indian companies in the Global 500 rose from one to four.
American firms took half of the top 10 - dominated by car makers and oil giants - with Exxon Mobil as the number three, General Motors number five, Ford number six and General Electric number nine.
Britain got two of the top 10, with BP edging out Exxon Mobil for the first time to grab second place, and British-Dutch group Royal Dutch/Shell in the number four spot. German car group DaimlerChrysler is the seventh largest group in the world, Japanese car maker Toyota number eight, and French oil giant Total squeezing in at number 10.
