Fortune 1000 Rankings 2008, MoneyMoneyMoneyMoney!

Every year CNNMoney.com releases a list of the top companies in the United States called the Fortune 1000. This uber-competitive list can be an interesting gauge of the status of the economy and can also reveal which companies are up-and-coming and which companies are struggling to hold on.

Below is a map I created of the headquarters of the Fortune 1000 companies for 2008. Click on the map to see specific companies and get information about their revenue, profits, and location.

I used proportional symbols to represent largest to smallest revenues. From this map we can see that states such as California, Texas, New Jersey and New York are revenue rich due to the large numbers of Fortune companies there. Click some of the symbols to get a specific dollar value for any of the companies. This dataset can be viewed in Finder!

There are a lot of interesting data to analyze and the site also provides some pretty cool breakdowns of the list, such as the top 50 companies that climbed up the list and the top 50 companies that stumbled down the list. This data is from 2006 so may not include some of the 2008 list, but illustrates the constant rise and fall of companies all vying for the highest rank. Below is a map I created from those two lists highlighting this competitive ranking system. Click on the points to see which companies went up or down in the ranks. The orange symbols represent those companies that climbed the ranks, whereas the blue show those that fell. The largest blue symbols show the least drop in rank and the smallest blue symbols show the greatest drop. I used a dataset for climbers and a dataset for fallers, which can be viewed in Finder!.

Some of the companies remain in the highest ranks consistently, so I created a map in Maker! from my original data set, by combining ranking data from 2007 and 2008. I focused on the companies that stayed in the top 100 for both years. The points include data for ranks for both years, revenues, and profits. Typically, companies with the largest overall revenues have stayed the same rank with Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron, GM, ConocoPhillips, General Electric, For Motor, Citigroup, and Bank of America completing the top nine for the past two years. Below is a map of these companies which can be found at Geocommons.

This dataset can be viewed in Finder!

If you are looking for a job or want to relocate this list can be a valuable resource for locating hotbeds of Fortune Companies in the United States. Upon first glance, it is obvious that California’s coast and the East Coast have tons of Fortune Companies, but if you look closer, you can find many in the midwest. Minneapolis and Chicago are two examples of Fortune dense cities. See if you can come up with an interesting map of your own.