A Look Behind the Metrics

Once again, we have carried over our universe of companies, with some modification, for our annual rankings based upon our traditional criteria: the companies must be publicly listed corporations, the companies’ major income must come from shipping or other marine operations and the companies must provide audited or, at least publicly issued, financial information for the year 2006.

We continue to focus the Rankings on a core universe of commodity and offshore shipping to which we added, as promised, the robust class of 2005 IPO successes. It was not feasible last year to include these in the overall 2005 Rankings for the simple reason that most reported only stump figures, which greatly skew the results of the larger established universe. We said that last year and we warned also to watch out that given a full year their performance would dazzle, and they do. This year we had to leave 2006′s new entrants aside for the same reason. They will make their mainstream debut next year. In the meantime, we have included a sneak preview, in the next article, of the 2006 IPO companies.

All told the universe now comprises the 66 companies ranked last year, the 2005 Freshman class, other additions which fell below our radar last year and finally some deletions due to lack of complete financial information and one major acquisition. The newest additions and most recently discontinued companies are shown in Figure 1. Our total this year stands at 86.

This is only an excerpt of A Look Behind the Metrics

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