EXXON-MOBIL - Exonerated for Profits

"Taking on the world's toughest energy challenges," is the punch line of Exxon Mobil, a $370 billion turnover corporation, which is the world's largest (or second largest, depending on what the oil prices were when you read this article) in terms of revenues. This very same company recently made news by entering the growing Indian economy through the FDI route. This colossal company was the result of a triumphant merger between Exxon and Mobil; a merger whose execution concluded on November 30, 1999. While Mobil's strong point was liquefied natural gas, Exxon had a strong hold on pipeline gas, thus completing the oil circle. The year 2006 saw a gravitational shift in leadership at Exxon Mobil with Lee Raymond, the long time Chairman and CEO, giving way to Rex Tillerson.

Exxon Mobil has continuously driven home the concept of technological progress, to be able to meet future energy needs. Exxon Mobil's Upstream Research Company has left no stones unturned to develop and deploy the latest technologies time and again to set world standards in their sector. No wonder Exxon Mobil has a market capitalisation that is more than that of any publicly traded company in the world. Very fascinatingly, Exxon Mobil's net profits ($36.13 billion) are more than the net profits of any publicly traded company in the history of mankind. More unbelievably, they paid a mind boggling dividend of $23.2 billion this year, a massive rise of 56% over last year. Compare this to, say, a relatively pitiable $1.63 billion by ConocoPhillips, or $3.7 billion paid by Chevron. The organisation has clearly been criticised by analysts as not investing enough in exploration.

For example, last year, while Chevron invested 79% of its profits on exploration, and ConocoPhillips invested 86%, Exxon Mobil invested only 49% - thus saving on huge costs. Analysts forecast that this shortsightedenss would come back to haunt Exxon Mobil in the next decade. Though this critique is extremely logical and in all probability would come true to debilitate Exxon Mobil in the coming years, it can be more than safely proclaimed that if the present were to be utilised to gauge the winner of competitive wars, Exxon Mobil is easily stealing more than a racing march ahead of its competitors, and by billion dollars of miles, if one could add!

Indian Oil Corporation - not just the poor man's Exxon

With a view to build national competence in the oil refining and marketing business, two companies, namely, Indian Refineries & Indian Oil Company were set up in 1958 and 1959, respectively. In 1964, these two companies merged to form the Indian Oil Corporation (IOCL). The company, which is accredited for several accomplishments, boasts of being the 18th largest petroleum company in the world and the number one petroleum trading company among the national oil companies in the Asia-Pacific region, with business interests in refineries, pipelines, gas, exploration, marketing, petrochemicals, and of course, research and development. With an astounding Rs.1,486 billion in revenues - making it India's largest corporation (a credit it has held for innumerable years) - not only has IOC become India's downstream major, but with the acquisition of companies like IBP, also a company whose network is a world-class benchmark, which includes over 23,000 sales points backed for supplies by 158 bulk storage points.

With growing competition, the company not only strengthened its R&D base, but also went on an expansionist spree, which included strategic collaborations and making itself present globally. Pioneering efforts in terms of retail marketing & customer satisfaction, have resulted in the growth of this behemoth, which attracts the best talent in India. The company today is facing a rough time due to soaring international crude oil prices not being supported by matching domestic price rise - due to government regulations. The recent sale of IOC's equity in ONGC, and other public policy advocacy announcements, have only reaffirmed the fact that unless the government takes proactive measures, IOC would keep suffering debilitating opportunity losses. India's only claim to the original Fortune 500 list might just find itself slipping down in the coming years.

DELL - Dell'ivering the Needful; at right prices

Can technology beat technology? Sure it can. Is technology the only potent weapon? Certainly not, and one of the first companies to prove that was Dell. Founded by Michael Dell (then a university student) in 1984, the firm started by selling IBM compatible hardware, and then moved on to make IBM PC replicas through a most radical direct selling model, which eliminated middlemen (and their related costs) and provided for direct interface with the customer. The company focused on the concept of made-to-order PCs. From then on, Dell Computers never really looked back, going on to overtake IBM, and even HP to become the largest computer manufacturing company in the world.

What makes Dell's success even more remarkable is that no one has been able to duplicate Dell's business model in the computing industry. From revenues of around $300 million in 1989, Dell was touching revenues of $55.9 billion in 2005. The company delivered a record 43% of revenues from outside the US in 2005, a sign that emerging markets are becoming very critical. However, the competition Dell has been facing, even in emerging markets, is increasingly intense, especially with IBM's PC unit being taken over by the Chinese Lenovo, a thorough price leader.

Not surprisingly, the company recently announced that it would miss its earnings targets for the quarter ending March 2006. But despite that, Dell remains our benchmark for years to come, and not just for the dramatic innovation that it introduced in direct selling.

GOLDMAN SACHS - A Forprofit Company Surely

The Goldman Sachs foundation can be traced back to 1869 when a Jewish-German immigrant, Marcus Goldma, sowed its seeds. And since then till now, this foundation has grown to be "a firm" (as clients prefer referring to it) that has emerged as a global leader in the financial services spectrum. The business segments under Goldman's umbrella include Investment Banking, Trading & Principal Investments, Asset Management & Securities Services.

Goldman Sachs innovated the concept of not just selling financial solutions, but assisting clients in leading, innovating and growing. Right since its inception, Goldman has been designing its own pathway. In the early 20th century, it was this firm that popularized the use of P/E ratios for evaluating stocks, and was the first one to tap the potential of risk arbitrage. In 1950s, Guy Levy of Goldman Sachs altered global financial business equations by creating a technique, whereby, large blocks of securities could be bought and sold simultaneously.

Led by Chairman & CEO Hank Paulson currently, the firm has sales of $43 billion. Though this might be less than half of the largest financial services company in the world (Citigroup, with $108 billion sales), the fact remains that the firm is perhaps considered the most prestigious financial services and consulting company of the world. A benchmark? Without an iota of doubt!

ICICI BANK - The Emperor of Retail Banking

The government of India established the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India Ltd. (ICICI) in 1955. UTI, LIC, GIC and its subsidiaries were the major shareholders. In 1994, ICICI Bank was promoted as a subsidiary of ICICI. In these years, the bank has claimed the mantle of being most ruthlessly aggressive in gaining market shares in the Indian retail segment; an aggression that allowed it to become India's largest in the retail financing market despite the presence of legacy giants like SBI & Citibank; an aggression that allowed it to most appropriately make it to the benchmarks of the past 25 years. But, perhaps the biggest change agent for ICICI Bank has been K. V. Kamath, who took charge from 1996. He transformed the organisation from a development bank to a marketdriven financial institution.

Retail assets of the bank made up an amazing 63% of advances as on March 31, 2006. The corporation's net profits for the year ending March 2006, were $569 million- an increase of 27%. But more unbelievably, net customer assets of ICICI Bank increased a whopping 55% to $34 billion for the same year. With the largest credit card base in the country, and with the clear cut strategy of regularly introducing most innovative products and entering newer untapped markets (like micro-lending schemes), ICICI Bank clearly would remain at the cutting edge of performance benchmarks and industry leadership. And for us, a world-class institution!

GOOGLE.COM - search it not; for it will search you out

It's literally transmogrified into a synonym for search; and it's the world's largest internet search company in the world. For today's information hungry generation, Google provides the answer to all questions. It originated as a research project of Stanford Ph.D students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996. It was answering around ten thousand search queries a day by the time the company was officially launched. By February 1999, Google was answering around 500,000 queries a day, and was fast moving up as one of the top Internet companies of the world. One of the few companies to survive the dotcom crash, Google steadily grew in ad revenues and further developed its search engine algorithms, adding features like Google Image search, Google News, Adsense and Google Catalog search.

By 2000, Google started selling advertisements related to keywords search, which proved to be a crucial strategy in earning revenue. Google continued to grow by acquiring clients like AOL, Virgilio and VirginNet. Today Google includes Froogle (a search engine for shopping), Google Maps, which provides satellite images of road maps, and Google Earth, which can zoom into any spot on the earth. In 2004, Google launched its free web-based e-mail service Gmail.

Google went public in September, 2004 and since then, its share price has tripled. It has a current market capitalization of around $117 billion. "You can be serious without a suit," is one of the key principles of the corporate culture that Google is based on. This California based company has been criticized regularly by analysts of running on just one product for a very long time. It has further been criticised of, on one hand allowing the Chinese government to dictate what gets shown on Google's search results within China, and on the other hand, refusing to share confidential user search records with the US government. Despite criticism, Google has continued to outperform, and amazingly so remains a benchmark for the world to view.

WIPRO - how Western India Vegetable Products Ltd got kicked, got wild, and got a life!

Well, not quite literally; but as close as the above statement could get to. But Western India Vegetable Products Ltd. is what the acronym Wipro stood for, and selling cooking oil to small time retailers was what the company used to do, when Azim Premji had to return from Stanford, in mid-course, to prematurely take over the company (at the age of 21; see related story in personalities), after his father's death in 1966. Premji showed his relentless zeal for innovation and growth into diversified fields from the start. Wipro got into hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders in 1975, computer hardware unit in 1979 and then into toilet soaps in 1985. In 1989, Wipro GE Medical Systems Ltd. was formed in collaboration with General Electric, which pioneered the manufacture of ultrasound and computer topography systems in India. Wipro also launched a lighting business in 1992.

As evidence of how brilliant the culture of competent dynamism is within Wipro, the ventures discussed above currently make up just about 8.5% of Wipro's revenues, and 6% of its profi ts (before taxes). The rest of its revenue & profits come from Wipro's IT services and product offerings. For a company which used to sell oil, currently Wipro is renowned as a world-class soft ware solutions provider, a business which started unsuccessfully with its word sheet processing package. Apart from a world class consulting team, Wipro India has successfully leveraged its alliances with different partners. While most Indian companies had a tendency to tap the high margin consulting market, Wipro has strived to provide end to end consulting solutions. A major step was the acquisition of Spectramind to create Wipro Spectramind in 2003. Now rechristened Wipro BPO, this company is one of the leading Indian BPO companies, providing CRM, back office transaction processing and industry specific solutions. Kaavya's Opal might be down, but Premji's Wipro has seriously got a life!