Top 500 Publication
About Top 500 Publication
Celebrating 10 years of business excellence – and South Africa’s new era
Leverage the impressive market reach of the tenth-anniversary edition of our respected Top 500 publication. This is our most eagerly-awaited edition yet, bringing together as it will a host of CEOs, government leaders and renowned economic analysts to share their assessment of the last decade for South Africa, as well as their vision for the future; against the mandate of President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government to create jobs, recalibrate the parastatals, root out corruption and attract major international investment. The publication will also feature a Top 500 Awards retrospective and our eagerly-awaited index of South Africa’s top 5 companies across 100 different sectors, viewed as an essential reference for key decision-makers locally and internationally. The publication is couriered to all major government departments and leading CEOs in South Africa upon release and retails nationally for several months. Furthermore, the tenth edition will be viewed as a keepsake/collectible, meaning sustained brand exposure for participating companies looking to grow their impact and influence in our niche, high-end target market.
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How the Top 500 are identified
The Top500 research methodology has been designed in conjunction with the University of Cape Town’s Development Policy Research Unit.
Top500 aims to identify the top five companies in each of the 100 business sectors monitored by Topco Research Department. In order to do so, some measure of the qualities that we consider being characteristic of top companies must be designed in order to rank companies. To be classed as one of South Africa’s best companies, we expect companies to excel in three key spheres, namely financial performance, empowerment, and policy and accreditation.
The criteria within financial performance speak to the ideas of top companies being large, growing and productive institutions that are leaders by virtue of their size and dynamism. Financial performance is measured by four indicators: turnover, rate of turnover growth, rand turnover growth, and turnover per employee.
Size is both an indicator and an outcome of whether or not a company is a top company. From the perspective of financial performance, turnover is used to proxy company size and this indicator has a large weight within the measure. The dynamism of top companies is reflected in their ability to expand and grow, and so we include two indicators – one relative, one absolute – of growth in the score sheet. The former indicator is the rate of turnover growth over the year, since top companies are faster-growing, while the latter is the rand value of the turnover growth.
Absolute turnover growth is included to account for the fact that top companies’ growth should make a large contribution to increased total output. These two indicators have a medium weight within the scoring system. Top companies are more productive than other companies and the final performance indicator, turnover per employee, which has a medium weight, speaks to this characteristic.