The Hindu Business Line : Infosys, Cognizant in Top Five league

INFOSYS and Cognizant Technology Solutions have emerged among the top five services companies globally after Accenture, IBM and Computer Sciences Corporation, the BusinessWeek magazine said in its latest InfoTech 100 scoreboard. Other players ranked in the scoreboard include Wipro, ADP, Unisys, First Data and ACS.

Among companies that have a strong India presence, in the overall ranking, Accenture ranked 9, IBM 10, Infosys 27, CSC 30, Cognizant 37 and Wipro 62, the magazine said.

To compile the Information Technology 100, BusinessWeek began with financial data from Standard & Poor's, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies that has computerised information on 10,000 publicly traded corporations. They then trimmed this universe to information technology companies and then added non-US technology companies recommended by their network of foreign bureaus.

To qualify, companies had to have revenues of at least $300 million. BusinessWeek then divided this collection of about 550 companies into eight industry categories, such as software and semiconductors.

Companies, whose stock price has dropped more than 75 per cent, or where other developments raised questions about future performance, were eliminated. It also dropped phone companies whose monopoly or near-monopoly power gives them an unfair advantage over competitors.

The companies ranked were on four criteria: Shareholder return, return on equity, and revenue growth (which were given equal weight), and total revenues (which was given 1.5 times the weighting of the other categories).