Corporations that will survive 100 years

Sustainability is the buzzword of the day. In a recent study, the global PR firm Weber Shandwick found that, aside from chief executive officers, chief sustainability officers were the most-wanted executives for business conferences. Companies are doing all they can to ensure their survival right now.

Innovest Strategic Value Advisors has pulled together a list of 100 stalwart companies poised to survive past all others. These are the companies that stand the best chance to still be around in the year 2109. Let's hope a recession in 2108 doesn't knock them out.

Toby Heaps, president of Corporate Knights, a Canada-based sustainability-focused media outfit, runs the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations list. Each year, Heaps and Innovest track which companies are doing the best in several major sustainability-related areas, including human capital, environmental risks, governance and more. The results are added up to find the most sustainable businesses of all.

The list is not a ranking. It looks only at AAA-rated corporations that can be considered models of sustainability, and they are picked to cover a broad range of industries.

Although the Global 100 has outperformed the Dow Jones industrial average and MSCI World Index since early 2005, its formulators do not include price-to-earnings ratios, market capitalization and other current market data in their determinations. Therefore, Heaps warns, some of the companies, while extremely promising in the long term, may be overpriced at the moment--although, he adds, there's not a great deal of overpricing out there right now.

Almost half of the corporations that make the list have already been around for a century in one form or another. Some have changed a number of times through acquisitions, mergers and the like. Stora Enso, a Finland-based paper and packaging company, traces itself back to documents from the year 1288--though its current iteration comes from a merger in 1998.

Looking for some of the big names everyone knows? The tech goliaths Google, Apple and Microsoft didn't make it, each for a different reason. But technology is a fickle industry, especially over the course of a century.

Google isn't on the list largely because of what's known as social risk. Privacy issues have dogged it, and in addressing them, the company has found itself dealing with legal questions ahead of customer satisfaction. Apple suffers from governance questions--particularly concerning Steve Jobs' health and the lack of a clear succession plan. Microsoft's difficulty with the European Union and its work on supposed brain-computer interface software means the company has run both regulatory and social risks.

Heaps started the Global 100 list in 2005. "I wanted to shine a light on better- equipped companies for the long term," he says. He hopes the list will help both investors and companies alike. "What gets measured gets managed."