The 2014 Value Creators Rankings

The 2014 Value Creators rankings are based on an analysis of TSR at 1,620 global companies for the five-year period from 2009 through 2013.

To arrive at this sample, we began with TSR data for nearly 10,000 companies provided by Thomson Reuters. We eliminated all companies that were not listed on a world stock exchange for the full five years of our study or did not have at least 25 percent of their shares available on public capital markets. We further refined the sample by organizing the remaining companies into 26 industry groups and establishing an appropriate market-valuation hurdle to eliminate the smallest companies in each industry. (The size of the market-valuation hurdle for each industry can be found in the tables under “Industry Rankings.”) In addition to our 1,620-company comprehensive sample, we separated out 164 companies with market valuations of more than $50 billion. We have included a table of rankings of these large-cap companies under “Global Rankings.”

The global and industry rankings are based on five-year TSR performance from 2009 through 2013.¹ 1 TSR is a dynamic ratio that includes price gains and dividend payments for a specific stock during a given period. To measure performance from 2009 through 2013, 2008 end-of-year data must be used as a starting point in order to capture the change from 2008 to 2009, which determines 2009 TSR. For this reason, all exhibits in the report showing 2009-2013 performance begin with a 2008 data point. Notes: 1 TSR is a dynamic ratio that includes price gains and dividend payments for a specific stock during a given period. To measure performance from 2009 through 2013, 2008 end-of-year data must be used as a starting point in order to capture the change from 2008 to 2009, which determines 2009 TSR. For this reason, all exhibits in the report showing 2009-2013 performance begin with a 2008 data point. We also show TSR performance for 2014, through February 26, 2014. In addition, for all but two of the industry rankings, we break down TSR performance into the six investor-oriented financial metrics used in the BCG TSR model: sales growth, margin change, multiple change, dividend yield, change in the number of shares outstanding, and change in net debt. For two industries, banking and insurance, we use a slightly different approach to TSR disaggregation owing to the special analytical problems involved in measuring value creation in those sectors.