Sinopec Corp, one of China's largest oil producers, wins the crown of leading the 2005 Top 500 Chinese Enterprises list with a revenue of 634 billion yuan (US$78 billion), the China Enterprise Confederation (CEC) said on Friday.

The oil giant is followed by the State Grid Corp of China, last year's leader, PetroChina, China Mobile and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Li Jianming, director of CEC's research department, told China Daily.

Li said the total revenues of the 500 enterprises have reached 11.75 trillion yuan (US$1.4 trillion), which is 31 percent higher than that of last year and accounts for more than 82 percent of China's gross domestic product.

The last enterprise on the list has revenues of 4.5 billion yuan (US$554.8 million), 48 percent more than that of the company which ended last year's list, he said.

Further details of the list will be released on Sunday.

The CEC has been issuing such a list annually since 2002. The order of the enterprises is determined by their revenues.

Two additional lists - Top 500 Chinese Companies in the Manufacturing Industry and Top 500 Chinese Companies in the Service Industry - will be made public for the first time on Sunday.

"China has become the world's factory, but the Chinese manufacturing enterprises are not globally competitive. China's service industry also lags far behind developed countries," Chen Lantong, CEC's vice-president, said earlier in July.

"By releasing two new lists, we hope to provide more profound understanding and analysis on China's manufacturing and service industries."

To make the lists more scientific, a company's investment in research and development (R&D) is considered, for the first time, in the assessment this year, Chen said.

"We want that every enterprise that is eager to appear on the list really pays attention to R&D. Our studies show that the enterprises on the 2004 list on average only invested 1 percent of their revenues in R&D, which is really low globally," Chen said.

Compared with the Fortune Global 500 list, Chinese firms that lead the list are small in scale and usually come from industries that are controlled by large State-owned enterprises, said Liu Jisheng, a professor with the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University.

(China Daily August 20, 2005)