One month ago, Fortune celebrated the milestone of publishing the Fortune 500 for the 70th consecutive year. But what many readers today may not realize is that the ranking as it appeared in its early years is not completely analogous to the ranking of today.
That’s not because the businesses that made up the 500 back in 1955 are obsolete. In fact, as we highlighted last month, 49 companies have made the Fortune 500 all 70 years. Instead, a changing business landscape has precipitated a major shift. The first edition of the ranking appeared in 1955 as a list of America’s largest industrial corporations by revenue. Then, the following year, Fortune produced a sub-list of non-industrial companies to acknowledge those the main list overlooked.
In 1983, Fortune began generating a separate Service 500 list (containing banks, utility companies, and more) in addition to the main list. But its methodology differed from that of the Fortune 500. Companies in sectors such as financial services were ranked by the size of their assets, while those in other categories (transportation, retail) stacked up based on their revenues. It wasn’t until 1995 that Fortune combined industrial and service corporations on the same list for the first time. That means that the 2024 list, published June 4, marks the 30th edition of that hybrid list.
Thomas A. Stewart, the Fortune editor who wrote the 1995 essay introducing the list’s new methodology, “A New 500 for the New Economy,” emphasized that “the digital revolution has made the distinction between manufacturing and services increasingly theoretical: When industrial and service companies compete, they ought to be ranked against one another.”
“The distinction is fading as fast as a tan line in September,” he joked a few paragraphs later. Among the examples he offered, he noted that “software manufacturers offer personal-finance services, airlines sell mutual funds, automakers write insurance.”
From 1994 to 1995, before and after the shift, the top three companies on the list were identical: General Motors was No. 1, Ford Motor was No. 2, and Exxon was No. 3. (General Motors was also No. 1 on the first-ever Fortune 500, in 1955.) However, three newcomers debuted within the top 10 on the list: Wal-Mart Stores was No. 4, AT&T was No. 5, and Sears Roebuck was No. 9.
Many companies that joined the list back in 1995 still appear prominently on it today; others (like Sears) have vanished from the ranking entirely. But the shift in scope of the list back then paved the way for the ranking as we know it in the 21st century. Read on for more details about the Fortune 500 of 1995 vs. today.
$154.9 billion… the revenue of General Motors for the 1994 fiscal year (1994 dollars/not adjusted for inflation). It was the top company on the 1995 Fortune 500, and it had ranked No. 1 31 other times between 1955 and 1995 (bested only by Exxon the other nine times).
No. 19… General Motors’s rank on the 2024 Fortune 500.
$83.4 billion… the revenue of Wal-Mart Stores in 1994 dollars when it made its debut at No. 4 on the 1995 Fortune 500. (For an inflation-adjusted figure, you’d have to more than double that amount.)
$2.2 billion… the 1994 revenue of Dow Corning, No. 500 on the 1995 list.
$4.2 trillion… combined revenue of the 1995 Fortune 500 (in 1994 dollars), compared with $18.8 trillion for the 2024 Fortune 500.
$648.1 billion… Walmart’s revenue in 2023, which led it to earn the No. 1 spot on the Fortune 500 for the 12th consecutive year in 2024.
1962… the year the first Wal-Mart store opened.
116… the number of companies that made both the 1955 Fortune 500 list and the 1995 Fortune 500 list.
The Fortune editors from 1995 pinpointed digitization and deregulation as a “one-two punch”—the twin factors that led to shifts that resulted in service corporations finally qualifying for the Fortune 500 ranking. These two factors continue to shape business today.
The distinction of an “industrial” company
Longtime Fortune staffer Carol Loomis, whose tenure at Fortune spanned both the 1955 and 1995 lists, noted in the 1995 Fortune 500 issue that “over 50% of a company’s sales had to come from manufacturing or mining” for it to qualify among industrials.
Many companies fell off the list over time between 1955 and 1995 once they no longer met those criteria. And in 1995, many service companies that had sizeable enough revenues unseated their industrial counterparts.
Others were on the cusp of those two categories in the mid-’90s. “In 1994 a showpiece industrial, General Electric, got 40% of its revenues from service businesses,” Fortune’s Stewart wrote. “By the old standard, if current trends continued, GE would move to the Service 500 before long, probably followed by IBM.”
But the Fortune staff of 1995 was not totally ready to kiss the old methodology goodbye in 1995. So much so that the staff actually imagined the 1995 list the old way, too, within its pages in the May 15, 1995, issue.
“This year, we went to the trouble of calculating both the ‘new’ and an ‘old’ 500 that is composed of industrial companies only,” Loomis wrote. This “old” list didn’t get the same treatment as “new” index did in the numerous pages that followed, but the staff pulled out some eye-popping stats. For example, if they’d continued calculating the list the old way, the 1995 Fortune 500 would have had a cumulative 11.6 million employees. But tabulated the new way, with service companies, employee counts totaled 20.2 million.
The rise of mega-industries
It’s hard to imagine a time when “banking” wasn’t synonymous with the “financial services industry,” but in the pages of the 1995 Fortune 500 issue, the editors detailed how digitization and deregulation were coalescing to blur this line, too. As one source, Laura Estes, who ran the 401(k) and rollover IRA business for Aetna Life, put it, “Everybody is going after the money in everybody else’s pocket. My competition is mutual funds and banks.”
On the Service 500 lists of 1983 through 1994, banks were ranked based on the size of their assets. But as the editors of the 1995 Fortune 500 noted, banks began prioritizing revenues, generated via loans and service fees, in the years that followed. The share of banks’ revenue derived from these sources ballooned from less than one-quarter to one-third during the Service 500 list’s existence.
And it wasn’t just finance. Telecommunications and utilities saw the same assets-to-revenues shift. Similarly, they saw their businesses overlapping increasingly often, along with those of entertainment and computing companies, birthing the “information technology” industry.
From there, even these mega-industries were threatening to blur lines. “Want to make a financial services executive sweat?” Stewart quipped in Fortune’s 1995 pages. “Say ‘Microsoft.’”
And what do you know? Nearly three decades later, Microsoft ranked as the most valuable company on the 2024 Fortune 500, with $3.1 trillion in market value.
