Dataset of the Day: Profitability of the Fortune 1000

Economic Impact on Fortune 1000
CNN money just came out with its 2009 List for the Fortune 1000, the 1000 largest American companies. This list gives us an interesting look at the health of big business throughout the United States. Companies make the Fortune based on their revenues, not their profits. General Motors comes in ranked 6th in the Fortune 1000, based on revenues ($148,979,000,000 in revenues), even though they have lost $30,860,000,000 dollars (based on profits). The Fortune List does a great job of showing this data, but we wanted to take a look at the dataset as a whole, to see if these huge companies are actually profitable. We’ve all heard the saying ‘too big to fail’, but what about asking the question ‘are they too big to profit?’

We loaded the profit data into maker!, and we immediately noticed the histogram for the layer. The vast majority of Companies all had profits that were relatively near zero, with some huge outliers. Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Microsoft, and GE are still hugely profitable companies, while many of the Financial Services companies, such as AIG, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae, are unable to profit.

Histogram Shown Below (to view the histogram and filter the data on your own click the down arrow on the layers box):

I downloaded the raw data file here to start to do some calculations in Excel and play with the numbers a bit more. Here is a bit of what i learned: Only 707 of the largest companies in the US actually made any profits last year! The average profit for a Fortune 1000 company in 2009 is only $103,000,000. The average rank of companies that made money was 484, while the average rank of Companies that lost money was 536, which shows that revenues for these large companies are having almost no impact on their profits. The question then becomes what factors would predict profitability? It would be incredibly interesting to look at other variables other than just profits and revenues. Using a company’s internal data and comparing it to the other fortune 1000 companies could be very telling in which internal factors have the greatest impact on a company’s profitability, perhaps investment in technology, or lowering overhead. This type of analysis could easily be done with our GeoIQ Enterprise Solution.

Here is the Map of Fortune 1000 Profits in the US:
#maker_map_4705 {width: 100%; height: 400px;}

View full map

Maker.maker_host=’http://maker.geocommons.com’;Maker.finder_host=’http://finder.geocommons.com’;Maker.core_host=’http://core.geocommons.com’;
Maker.load_map(“maker_map_4705″, “4705″);

This map doesn’t show much variation in the size of the points due to the fact that they are so strongly clustered around the break-even point, and the outliers are so severe. 4-5 companies account for nearly half of the distribution of the histogram.