The Top500 in Europe

The best companies in the ten main regions of Europe

Description of our method of collecting

1. Collection level: With some programs we are searching systematically through the internet for companies which may fit our needs. On this level the criteria are very simple. If for example the company has a special legal form, or its phone number indicates the existence of extension lines. On this level, we have already about 120.000 candidates in our database.
2. Research level: All interesting companies (the required minimum here is a yearly sales of one million Euro) are researched now for more details like the address, sales. About companies have passed this level and are at least on one of our lists. 3.000 companies are still on the research level.
3. Questionaire level: After we have checked out the data, we double check the data by sending a questionaire to the company.
4. Evaluation level: Now, we have plenty of large companies, but HOW large are they? Our main criteria is the yearly operational result. This is for most companies the sales of the company itself (we do not count the sales of the subsidiaries). For banks/insurances we get the value of assets/premium income and correct the value to make it comparable with the sales of other companies.
   Finally, we compare the relation of the GNP (Gross National Product) of a country to our found minimum company's output (the sales of the 500th company) with the same relation of Germany, where we have the most experience and where we are sure to have the 500 largest companies in our list.
5. Observation level: Partly automatically, we are checking their homepages and published news for changes within the companies. We also send out every 2 weeks a questionaire to about 5% of our companies. So every year, we are updating every entry in our database.

Our company is based in Germany. For researching and evaluating, we are using software tools, which we developped in the last years. Also the requests for information and reading of the filled forms is mostly done by programs. This ensures, that the forms filled out in different languages are handled properly and efficient.

The "tuning" (Correcting wrong filled out forms, removing of duplicates) is mostly done by our staff supported by some intelligent programs, which search through the database for duplicates and wrong interpretations of the filled forms or web-pages of the companies.

For special cases we have e-mail contacts to economical interested people in the major european countries.

But the final decision to publish a company on our web-site or in our lists is always done by an economical trained person.

This all ensures, that you will get reliable addresses on a high quality standard of the largest companies in Europe.