Change the World

Fortune’s Change the World list is built on the premise that the profit motive can inspire companies to tackle society’s unmet needs. The 2020 list, our sixth, stresses a crucial corollary: No business succeeds alone. Collaboration among companies, even among rivals, is a common thread, from the effort to make “green” steel, to the campaign to close America’s racial wealth gap, and, above all, in the race for a COVID-19 vaccine. As we face unprecedented collective challenges—a global pandemic, climate change, profound income inequality cooperation has become a business superpower. Speaking of cooperation: As always, we’ve selected our list in collaboration with our expert partners at Shared Value Initiative, a consultancy that helps companies apply business skills to social problems.

METHODOLOGY

The Top Ten

The Vaccine Makers

NEW

Pharmaceuticals

Nearly 200 possible COVID-19 vaccines in development. Thirty-nine in human clinical trials. Nine in Phase III trials. The extent to which the pharmaceutical industry has mobilized to attack the pandemic is truly unprecedented. But just as unprecedented is the sector’s wholehearted embrace of collaboration. We’ve seen traditional pharma giant AstraZeneca partner with a venerable academic institution (University of Oxford) to swiftly bring a vaccine candidate from lab to human trial. We’ve seen rivals snuggle up in pairs (Sanofi and GSK) and international collaborations galore: Germany’s BioNTech, for instance, is testing one novel messenger RNA vaccine with giant Pfizer, in New York, and a second with Fosun Pharma, in Shanghai. As Giovanni Caforio, CEO of Bristol Myers Squibb, told Fortune this summer: “I have never seen the level of collaboration that’s going on today … so how do we take what we’ve learned in the last six months and apply it to cancer?” Or, for that matter, to dengue, diabetes, and myriad other plagues? Read more: 'The whole world is coming together': How the race for a COVID vaccine is revolutionizing Big Pharma

Alibaba Group Holding

+35 spotsPrev. #37

Internet Services and Retailing

As the pandemic took hold, China’s e-commerce titan showed how flexible its global infrastructure could be in a crisis. Early on, Alibaba turned its Electronic World Trade Platform—an entity designed for public-private cooperation—into a hub for sourcing personal protective equipment in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Its Alibaba.com B2B platform has helped distribute more than 26 million pieces of PPE to health care providers. Researchers, meanwhile, have relied on its cloud-computing resources to collaborate on COVID-19 vaccine development. Outside the medical realm, Alibaba extended lifelines to the small sellers who represent much of its customer base. Its Taobao Live e-commerce platform helped farmers reach new customers after their supply lines were broken. And Alibaba helped provide some $20 billion in low-interest loans and cash advances to cushion small-business owners in the downturn—an act that showed the prowess of its soon-to-be independent financial unit, Ant Group.

PayPal Holdings

NEW

Financial Data Services

Last fall, the digital payment company spent tens of millions of dollars to raise its workers’ wages and lower the costs of their benefits. This spring, as the pandemic led to tens of millions of layoffs, CEO Dan Schulman (at left in photo, with PayPal employees in Omaha) pledged that all PayPal jobs would be safe from COVID-related cuts. The company also played a major role in bolstering other people’s security: It helped some customers get faster access to their coronavirus stimulus payments, by waiving the 1% fees it usually charges to rapidly cash payroll and government checks. In a crisis, “if you put your employees first and you put your customers first, then nobody forgets that, and you come out of this in a really strong position,” Schulman told Fortune in April. PayPal’s subsequent performance has borne out his argument. The company in July reported its strongest quarter ever as an independent company: Second-quarter revenue jumped 22% from a year earlier, to $5.3 billion, with profit nearly doubled, to $1.5 billion.

Nvidia

NEW

Semiconductors and Other Electronics

The graphics processing units (GPUs) that have made Nvidia one of Silicon Valley’s fastest- growing companies have also become the engines powering a host of medical advances. In 2017, Nvidia chips helped scientists win a Nobel Prize for their work creating 3D views of viruses, a critical tool for producing new vaccines. Its GPUs also enable scientists to use images like the one below to virtually screen more than a billion drug-candidate compounds and molecules in 24 hours—a process that would take five to 10 years of “wet lab” work. Its software expertise is fighting today’s pandemic as well: Nvidia and the National Institutes of Health recently codeveloped algorithms that can quickly identify COVID-19 in CT scans.

BlackRock

NEW

Securities

Few events moved the needle on corporate climate policy like CEO Larry Fink’s warning, in January, that BlackRock considers climate change an investment risk. The world’s largest asset manager, with $7.3 trillion under management, has since begun pressuring companies to be transparent about their exposure to climate risks, and used its shareholder clout to oppose policies that are climate-unfriendly.

Zoom Communications

NEW

Computer Software

Much of the world now relies on Zoom to work around the pandemic. In March, the now-ubiquitous provider of videoconferencing tools lifted a time limit on free calls for K–12 educators. Since then, Zoom has been used by more than 100,000 schools in 25 countries. Its paid customer base has also ballooned: In its second quarter, Zoom added more big-revenue enterprise accounts than ever before.

Safaricom

NEW

Telecommunications

Safaricom’s M-Pesa service lets its users, more than half of whom lack bank accounts, send and receive money digitally via feature phones. Now it’s aiming for a similar inclusion revolution in healthcare. In 2015, Safaricom and startup CarePay launched M-Tiba, which offers phone-based billing, payments, and insurance claims and helps users save for expenses. It now reaches 4.7 million people in Africa.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals

NEW

Pharmaceuticals

The world has battled Ebola since 1976, but only late last year did it get therapies that should meaningfully reduce the virus’s death toll. In a randomized clinical trial conducted during an outbreak in Africa, one such drug—Regeneron’s antibody cocktail, EB3—proved so clearly effective in reducing mortality that the trial was ended early. Regeneron is now racing to develop a comparable cocktail for COVID-19.

Walmart

-4 spotsPrev. #5

General Merchandise

The world’s largest company became an irreplaceable community resource as the COVID crisis engulfed the U.S. The retail giant offers drive-by pickup of online orders, an arena that Walmart pioneered, at about 3,300 of its 4,750 U.S. stores. The number of such orders more than quadrupled from mid-March through July, as consumers—particularly those over 50—scrambled for contactless shopping options. The surge sparked a need for new staff to fill curbside orders, and Walmart hired nearly 500,000 additional workers at the peak of the spring’s lockdowns—in part by partnering with the National Restaurant Association to recruit workers displaced from that battered industry. A strong pickup business can also have environmental benefits: A recent study by Bain estimates that pickup purchases generate 75% fewer CO2 emissions per item than purchases ordered online and delivered by mail. Walmart also acted fast to help customers access relief payments quickly and cheaply. People processed $434 million worth of stimulus checks via direct deposit to its MoneyCard prepaid debit cards; the company waived maintenance fees on the cards and began for the first time to pay interest on unspent balances. Walmart’s pandemic response went hand in hand with powerful financial performance: It has tallied two quarters of comparable-store sales growth near 10% and a near-doubling of e-commerce. It’s also earning rising scores on reputation surveys—and is making its sixth consecutive appearance on this list.

Serum Institute of India

NEW

Pharmaceuticals

Though hardly a household name, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer is much in the news these days for its role in accelerating the COVID-19 vaccine race. With its enormous capacity, the Serum Institute of India has made deals to manufacture 1 billion doses of both AstraZeneca’s and Novavax’s candidates for low- and middle-income countries. That’s big, but what really makes SII stand out is its long history of providing critical, low-cost vaccines to underserved populations. From tetanus to measles to pneumococcal shots, SII makes 1.5 billion doses of vaccine annually, the vast majority of which also go to low- and middle-income countries—and reach 65% of the planet’s children—through programs administered by organizations like Unicef and GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, which focuses on providing access in the poorest countries. “They really have done an amazing job at providing high quality at very low prices,” says Seth Berkley, CEO of GAVI, which named SII founder Cyrus Poonawalla its first-ever “Vaccine Hero” in 2018. “That has been really important to what we’ve done.” Founded in 1966, SII was a somewhat unlikely endeavor for Poonawalla, an aspiring automaker whose family was in the business of stud farms. After he learned the family’s retired horses were being donated to a government institute that used their serum to make vaccines, a scarce good in India at the time, he decided to get into the business himself. Many credit Poonawalla’s strong moral compass—as well as his decision to keep the company private—for building SII into the company it is today. (His son, Adar, who took the reins as CEO in 2011, has pursued aggressive growth—annual revenues have more than tripled since 2012, to $800 million today—while remaining loyal to his father’s mission to put purpose ahead of extreme profit.) Berkley recalls that when other vaccine manufacturers failed to deliver product, SII would step up production to meet the need. “They never turned around and tried to increase the price to take advantage of the fact that they were needed,” says Berkley. In the early 2000s, SII played a key role in one of global health’s great success stories: MenAfriVac, a vaccine against meningitis A that has virtually eliminated the disease in 22 countries in Africa’s “meningitis belt.” The global health organization PATH led the vaccine’s development, but it needed a manufacturer partner who could produce the vaccine at a cost of 50¢ or less per dose. “They proved to be a very, very capable organization,” says Steve Davis, the former CEO of PATH. “They’re also very, very sharp business guys.” Indeed, MenAfriVac was good for SII too. Similar projects and partnerships with PATH followed—among others, the company has since produced a much needed, low-cost pneumococcal vaccine that gained approval last year. In the process, SII picked up some of the expertise that it’s now using to develop its own vaccines internally. That includes three possible shots against COVID-19 that the company will continue to work on while pitching in to manufacture the vaccines of others. Says Adar Poonawalla: “My own candidates, I want to take my time.” (Read Fortune's Q&A with Adar Poonawalla.)