Fortune magazine has sent an official letter to China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) stating that its list of the Global 500 Companies has been revised, and that CNPC has been upgraded from the 73rd to the 52nd largest company in the world, a source from the CNPC announced Thursday.

Fortune on July 12 released the latest listing of the Global 500 Companies, its well-known ranking of the world's largest companies. On that list, CNPC was ranked 73rd, with revenues of 47,049 million US dollars.

"The publicized figure for revenues of CNPC is remarkably different from what our finance people provided to Fortune on May 14,2004, which caused the incorrect ranking of the company," said Wen Qingshan, director of CNPC's Finance and Assets Department, in an exclusive interview with Xinhua.

In CNPC's e-mail to Fortune on May 14,2004, the company stated its revenues at 475,287 million RMB yuan. After deducting 8,588 million yuan in excise taxes, the revenues are 466,699million yuan, equal to around 56,387 million US dollars at the exchange rate of 8.2767.

The figure was misstated as 47,049 million US dollars in the magazine, however, 9,338 million US dollars too low, said Wen.

On July 15, CNPC delivered an letter to Fortune, expressing its deepest regrets and hoping that effective remedial measures could be undertaken as soon as possible to accurate list CNPC's revenue.

Fortune wrote back at the same day, saying that "Fortune deeply regrets the error that was made in the listing of the Global 500.A correction will be made as soon as we receive the proper documentation for CNPC: a full balance sheet and income statement presented in a clear manner, accompanied by a completed Fortune 500 Global survey form."

Fortune also explained in the letter that the error was made because "we received undocumented data that were presented in a confusing manner. We have learned from the mistakes made by both CNPC and Fortune."

On July 20, Fortune sent another letter to CNPC, saying that its revenues and profits in the listing of the Global 500 Companies in the July 26 edition have been revised and will appear in the next edition. Fortune has already revised the list at its official website, according to CNPC official.

The letter said that based on a clarification received from the company, revenues were revised upward to 56.384 billion US dollars, ranking CNPC as the 52nd largest company in the world, the 10th largest in Asia and the second largest in China. Profits were revised to 4351.4 million US dollars, ranking the company 46th in profits.

CNPC, China's largest state-owned petroleum company was ranked in the listing of Global 500 as the 83rd largest company in the world in 2001,81st in 2002 and 69th in 2003.

During the past ten years, numbers of US companies in the Global 500 have increased from 151 to 189, while Japanese companies have dropped from 149 to 82; Chinese companies have risen from three to 15.

(Eastday July 23, 2004)