Fortune has published its flagship Fortune 500 list, ranking the largest U.S.-based companies by revenue, since 1955. For the first couple of decades, the research staff focused its efforts on American companies. Then, in 1976, the magazine began tabulating a separate international list of non-U.S. companies alongside the annual domestic list.
As the turn of the century approached, globalization was progressing rapidly, and entirely separating the U.S. and non-U.S. lists started to make less sense. “Now that the global village is truly upon us, it looks more like a global industrial park,” wrote Fortune reporters Jung Ah Pak and Sally Solo in the July 30, 1990, issue. So the first edition of the Fortune Global 500 debuted in 1990, combining U.S. and non-U.S. companies in one ranking.
The Fortune 500 and the Global 500, until 1995, only featured “industrial” corporations—the ones that made things. They excluded ”service” corporations such as banks, utility companies, retailers, and more. This is important context when examining the top 10 of the 1990 Global 500, which ranked as follows:
- General Motors (No. 35 on the 2025 Global 500)
- Ford Motor (today No. 36)
- Exxon (today merged with Mobil to become ExxonMobil, No. 14)
- Royal Dutch/Shell Group (today on the list as Shell, No. 18)
- Int‘l Business Machines (today on the list as IBM, No. 221)
- Toyota Motor (today No. 15)
- General Electric (today: GE Aerospace, No. 402; GE Vernova, No. 462; and GE HealthCare Technologies, which is not on the Global 500)
- Mobil (today merged with Exxon to become ExxonMobil, No. 14)
- Hitachi (today No. 216)
- British Petroleum (today on the list as BP, No. 33)
West and East Germany were still two separate nations when the Global 500 debuted in 1990. The Soviet Union was breaking up, the European Union was about to form, and China had yet to become a leader in the global economy.
Studying the Global 500 from one year to the next rarely inspires radical new insights about the companies that power the world, because major shifts in the ranking are rare on that timescale. Even when you look back decades, you don’t see big surprises. That’s in part because of the staying power of the stalwarts of business; it’s also because the Fortune staff who preceded me were quite prescient in their characterizations of the changes afoot. Their novel declarations then are history textbook fodder today.
But sometimes they forecasted incorrectly, too. The 1990 article talks about Japan’s growing footprint on the list. There were 111 Japanese companies on the 1990 Global 500; on the 2025 list, there are only 38. And Pak and Solo’s essay posits that, “Perhaps early in the 21st century, or sooner, a Czechoslovak company will make Fortune’s top 100.” That has not yet come to pass.
