Information

Rarely are places such as New York and Wolfsburg to be found in the same sentence, however, when it comes to where the 20 largest companies in the world have their headquarters they are on the same list. Otherwise unfamiliar locations such as Bentonville, Arkansas and San Antonio, just north of San Francisco, even come to the fore in global business terms.
Overall, these locations appear in the distribution of the world's 20 largest companies' headquarters, a pattern that also applies to the distribution of other business locations and basic economic power in the world. The greatest accumulations are found in the U.S. and Europe, with a smaller accumulation in East Asia. The world map has a blank display for South America, Africa, large parts of Asia, Australia and Oceania.

Choice of location
The choice of location for a business can basically be attributed to three reasons: Historical circumstances, as can happen to an otherwise insignificant town like Wolfsburg, which now has a world-wide reputation as Volkswagen's headquarters. Companies also choose their location for tax benefits. It is no coincidence that New York City leads the world rankings with three of the top 20 sites/locations. Another reason can be that the location is centrally directed by a state administration, such as with the three ranked locations/sites in Beijing.

Industrial structures of companies
Among the 20 largest companies in the world are those who have an annual turnover of more than $98 billion dollars and generate more than $ 4.1 billion (U.S.) profit, with more than 96,000 employees. Nine companies dominate the energy production, processing and distribution sectors. These include Gazprom (Moscow), BP (London), Total (Paris) and State Grid (Beijing). HSBC (London) and the Royal Bank of Scotland (Edinburgh) are included in the top five companies in the banking and insurance industries. The automotive and IT industries are each represented twice in the rankings with Toyota (Nagoya) and Volkswagen on one side and AT & T (San Antonio) and IBM (New York) on the other. Individual phenomenons in their own sectors are the retailers Wal-Mart (Bentonville) and the steel giant Arcelor Mittal (Luxembourg).
Most of the companies are trans-national and are focused on continual growth. In 2007, Arcelor Mittal was created through the merger of Arcelor in Luxembourg and Mittal Steel Company in Rotterdam. Arcelor was formed in 2001 from Aceralia (Bilbao), Arbed (Luxembourg) and Usinor (Paris). Today, the group has more than 315,000 employees with its production facilities distributed over 60 countries. In 2008, Arcelor Mittal, had earnings of nearly $125 billion (U.S.) and produced about 10% of all global steel supplies.
D. Falk; Ü: C. Fleming