The world's BEST companies

Ambitious companies want to operate on a global scale, to take advantage of global markets, global procurement and global production. To succeed in today's global economy, it does not hurt to be big.

At Forbes.com, we have established the definitive benchmark for corporate size: the Forbes 2000, our list of the world's 2000 largest public companies.

We rank companies using our proprietary composite scores for sales, profits, assets and market value. This multi-variable methodology corrects the lopsided indicators of which companies are most important to the world's economy that are based on a single metric, such as sales.

Yet size alone is no guarantee of success, which is why we have taken a second cut at the Forbes 2000 to find big companies that are absolutely great at what they do. The result is a list of elite companies that can truly be described as global high performers.

Slideshows:
The World's Best Big Companies
The Bosses Of The Best Big Companies
Top Performing Food Companies

To find these rare jewels, our statisticians sorted the members of the Forbes 2000 by industry and put them through rigorous screens in search of companies with manageable debt and the best balance of long- and short-term return on equity, sales growth, earnings growth and return to shareholders.

When it comes to the corporate world, the past is not necessarily prologue, so we looked next for companies with favorable long-term earnings growth forecasts from Thomson Financial IBES.

We also know that while the numbers don't lie, some companies can be economical with the truth when it comes to accounting practices, so we turned to Audit Integrity of Los Angeles to help us cull companies with problematic accounting techniques, earnings quality or corporate governance problems.

Finally, our editors dropped companies that had legal or other challenges that might impede future growth.

Slideshows:
Top-Performing Service Companies
Top Performing Conglomerates
Top-Performing Retail Companies

The net result: Out of the 2,000 companies we started with, from Germany's Aareal Bank and the Swedish-Swiss engineering group ABB to America's Zions Bancorporation and Switzerland's Zurich Financial Services, fewer than 150 companies cleared all our hurdles.

We present here the top five in each of 26 industries. All are world-class companies. And, remember, the difference between No. 1 and No. 5 in any industry is no more than the difference between excellent and superb.

Our high performers include a bunch of household names, among them Japanese carmaker Toyota Motor, German utility E.ON, Swiss food company Nestlé and Chinese oil company PetroChina.

They also include less familiar giants, such as:

--Oshkosh Truck, which makes vehicles with seriously big wheels for the defense, construction and refuse industries, as well as for fire and emergency services.

--Fastenal, which provides all manner of threaded fastenings for the construction industry and industrial companies.

--Sigma-Aldrich, which makes chemical products used in scientific and genomic research.

--HCC Insurance, a Houston-based specialty insurer.

--Brinker International, which runs a number of restaurant chains, including Chilis Bar & Grill, Romano's Macaroni Grill and On The Border Mexican Grill and Cantina.

Whether well-known or not, all these companies share a common trait: They have gone from big to great.