How We Did It

Business Today has been ranking India's largest companies - the BT500 - based on market capitalisation since 1993. This year's rankings are based on average market capitalisation for the 12-month period from October 1, 2019, to September 30, 2020. This provides readers the advantage of looking at the most recent numbers from stock exchanges. Along with October-September average market cap, we also provide average market cap over the past two fiscals for better understanding of how the companies have performed.

We also have tables that rank companies by assets, profit after tax, total income and debt. Companies in banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sectors have not been ranked on these parameters as their method of capturing and measuring these metrics is markedly different. BFSI companies have been highlighted in the tables so that you can easily identify them.

The Process

Our study is based on numbers from Accord Fintech's Ace Equity database. To arrive at our listings, we began with a master sample of 3,777 listed and actively traded companies. We used BSE market cap for all cases, except companies that are listed only on the National Stock Exchange. Companies that were not traded on at least 20 per cent out of 250 trading days in the October 2019-September 2020 period were excluded.

This reduced the number of companies to 3,311. Thereafter, we extracted the average market cap of each company over this period (October 2019-September 2020) and used it to rank the top 1,000 companies. You can find the Top 500 players from page 76, while the ranking of the next 501-1,000 companies can be accessed online at BusinessToday.In.

Other Parameters

The study is not limited to market cap. Metrics such as return on net worth (RONW) and return on capital employed (ROCE) are also there to help you make discerning comparisons. For most companies, the financial year ending is March 31. The exceptions have been mentioned in the footnotes.