The 2016 China Top Enterprise Summit is held in Changsha, Hunan Province, on Aug. 27. [Photo by Chen Boyuan / China.org.cn]

The State Grid Corporation of China, the country's biggest electricity company, was ranked as the most profitable Chinese company with an annual revenue of 2.07 trillion yuan (US$310.3 billion) in the 2016 China Top 500 Enterprises ranking released on Aug. 28 in Changsha, Hunan Province.

State Grid climbed two places from the 2015 list, nudging down last year's winner China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) to second place and runner-up Sinopec to third.

The other companies in the top 10 ranking did not change much, with the exception of the Ping'an Insurance Company of China, which surged to ninth place from 20th place last year. Moreover, the Guangdong-based Ping'an Insurance is the only company whose headquarters are not in Beijing.

The other six companies – the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China Construction Bank (CCB), China State Construction, Agricultural Bank of China, and Bank of China – retained their old rankings from the fourth to the eighth places, and China Mobile dropped one place and now sits at No. 10 in the new ranking.

Despite the consistency for the top 10 companies, this year's ranking is characterized most by the rising service sector in China, which represents 40.2 percent of all the names in the top 500 ranking, outweighing the manufacturing sector (39.3 percent) for the first time.

On a Top 500 Enterprises in the Service Sector list revealed at the same time, the top seven companies in this list managed to make to the general top 10, whereas the remaining three, China Life Insurance Company, China Development Bank and China Resources, are still in the general ranking's top 20 list.

This change reflects initial progress in the continuous, deepened structural reform of China, said Wang Zhongyu, chairman of China Enterprising Confederation (CEC) and China Enterprise Directors Association (CEDA), at the ranking's launch ceremony. CEC and CEDA are the agencies which have prepared these annual rankings since 2002.

China Top 500 companies had a gross revenue of US$9.6 trillion, equivalent to 79.9 percent of the Fortune 500 companies and up by 2.4 percentage points year on year. The revenues and net profits of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) account for 75.9 percent and 76.7 percent respectively of the 500 companies' totals, retaining the largest share of China's national economy.

Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)