The 2015 Value Creators rankings are based on an analysis of TSR at 1,982 global companies for the five-year period from 2010 through 2014.
To arrive at this sample, we began with TSR data for nearly 52,000 companies provided by S&P Capital IQ. 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 27 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 comprehensive sample, we separated out 177 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 2010 through 2014. We also show TSR performance for 2015, through May 5. 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 because of the special analytical problems involved in measuring value creation in those sectors.
