BW Real 500: Ranking Large Companies Thriving Amidst Global Turmoil

The BW Real 500 list is India’s most definite ranking of successful businesses. During 2022-23, India Inc. continued to grapple with escalating prices of oil, metals, and agricultural products that increased production costs for businesses across various sectors, squeezing profit margins. Despite that, companies powered through clocking healthy growth across vital parameters including revenue growth.

Research Methodology
The BW Real 500 list takes into account the income generated on the assets that are created by the companies. Like the last few years, we partnered with TechSci Research that selected only listed companies based on their turnover for FY2022-2023 (FY23) and ranked them on Total Income. The number crunching was done on available data sourced from BSE, NSE, annual reports and public filings, etc. Once the list of companies in each category (of top 500 non-financial institutions, top 10 banking institutions, top 20 non-banking financial companies) were prepared basis revenues, TechSci examined other indicators. For example, Total Asset. It is the total amount of assets owned by a company. TechSci has defined Total Income as the total amount of money that a company earns by selling its goods and/or services in the financial year under consideration. While terms like Profit Before Tax or Profit After Tax are self-explanatory, the term Reserves and Surplus included the summation of Capital Reserves, Retained Earnings, Fair Value Reserves, Hedging Reserves, Asset Revaluation Reserves, Foreign Currency Translation Reserves and Statutory Reserves.

Challenging Numbers
Fiscal year 2022-23 was certainly a more challenging year for the businesses compared to fiscal year 2021-22. In FY23, the top-5 companies in the BW Real 500 list could only generate a combined total income of Rs 38.7 lakh crore, a drastic drop over FY22 numbers of Rs 100.34 lakh crore. This clearly reflected the global headwinds and a tougher business climate that impacted India Inc. in 2022-23. The top-10 ranked companies generated a total income of Rs 55 lakh crore, less than half of what was generated by the top-10 ranked companies for fiscal year 2021-22. However, the top-15 companies together generated a total income of little over Rs 64 lakh crore in FY23 or just about half the total income generated by all the 500 companies together.

Dividends Galore
The central government continued to reap in the benefits of dividends from the central public sector enterprises (CPSEs) all through FY23. Total dividend receipts from the CPSEs for FY23 stood at Rs 59,533 crore. In FY21 and FY22, it stood at Rs 39,750 crore and Rs 59,294 crore, respectively. These exceed the revised estimated of Rs 34,717 crore and Rs 46,000 crore (for FY21 and FY22) and Rs 43,000 crore for FY23, the finance ministry said in the 2023 year-ender on DIPAM.

In FY23, Oil & Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) maintained its standing as the most profitable CPSE with Rs 38,829 crore net profit in FY23.

Overall, the CPSEs posted a 15 per cent year-on-year decline in their aggregate net profits to Rs 2.12 lakh crore in FY23 over FY22, owing mainly to the decline in the earnings of oil marketing and steel companies that were vulnerable to global commodity price cycles, and reduced profitability of steel firms.

"During the year, IOC registered its highest-ever revenue from operations, at Rs 9,34,953 crore, a 28 per cent YoY growth. We also notched up a net profit of Rs 8,242 crore, that underscores the inherent resilience that empowers us to rise above global challenges and make a mark," said S. M. Vaidya, Chairman, IOC. In fact, IOC continued to occupy the top position among companies for the third year in a row. 

Resilient Private Sector
Reliance Industries (RIL) continued its great run as well, further cementing its position as India’s largest and most profitable private sector company. In FY23, RIL was not just India’s largest company by market capitalisation (Rs 17,72,456 crore), it was the also largest by revenue (Rs 9,74,864 crore) as well as profitability (Rs 74,088 crore). RIL was one of the largest contributors to the economy vis-à-vis exports (Rs 3,40,048 crore), job creation (2,62,558 new jobs created during the year), and CSR spends (Rs 1,271crore).

Leading multinational automotive manufacturing company Tata Motors also gave a good account of itself in a challenging environment to deliver a healthy set of numbers and retain its seventh position in this year’s list of BW Real 500 companies. The company was ranked seventh in the previous two lists as well.

Addressing the shareholders, N.Chandrasekaran, Chairman, Tata Motors described FY 2022-23 as a “good year” for the company. “We had a good year with all automotive verticals delivering on their strategies leading to multiple achievements. Compared to FY 2021-22, vehicle sales increased 23 per cent to 13,35,819 units. Revenues rose to an all-time high Rs 3.46 lakh crore (up 24 per cent), EBITDA improved by 110 basis points (bps) and profit before tax (PBT) turned positive at Rs 1,500 crore.