China unveils 2011 list of top 500 companies

A list of this year's top 500 Chinese enterprises was unveiled in the city of Chengdu in southwest China's Sichuan Province on Saturday. The Sinopec Group was ranked first, with last year's revenues reaching 1.97 trillion yuan (307.81 billion U.S. dollars), followed by the China National Petroleum Corp. and State Grid Corp., whose revenues hit 1.72 trillion yuan and 1.53 trillion yuan last year, respectively. he rest of the top 10 was rounded out by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Mobile, China Railway Group, China Railway Construction Corp., China Construction Bank, China Life Insurance Co. and Agricultural Bank of China. The list is the 10th of its kind to be jointly released by the China Enterprise Confederation and the China Enterprise Directors Association. The threshold for entering the list was raised to 14.2 billion yuan in revenues, an increase over the 11.08-billion-yuan threshold used during the previous year. Revenues for China's top 500 companies rose 31.6 percent year-on-year to 36.31 trillion yuan in 2010, while their total assets increased by 18.4 percent to 108.1 trillion yuan, the two organizations said. The companies reported profits of 2.08 trillion yuan for last year, a rise of 38.67 percent from one year earlier. They paid 2.73 trillion yuan in taxes in 2010, accounting for 37.3 percent of the country's total tax revenues.