World's Best Companies: Nintendo Dominates All

Not content with simply dominating the computer game market, Nintendo has now been ranked #1 on BusinessWeek's 'World's Best Companies' chart for 2009. For a company based in Kyoto that, on the grand scheme of things, is much smaller than its peers, that's a pretty fantastic achievement for the house of Mario.

It seems that Nintendo's approach in betting on the loyal gamers, families and fence-sitters was just the right one to take the company up to the top of the global business platform. BusinessWeek's management consultant firm that compiled the list, A.T. Kearney, formulated this year's Top 40 businesses using the following practice:

"Kearney first calculates the median value growth rate--the rise of market capitalization after subtracting any increase in capital--and the sales growth rate for approximately 2,500 of the largest publicly listed companies around the world"

Using the above method, it was clear that Nintendo was going to chart very highly given its impressive market share boost since 2004. It's also worth noting that Sony nor Microsoft are listed in the Top 40 at all, making Nintendo the only computer game company (besides Apple, technically) to chart.