A t first glance you could be a mite surprised by the choice of some of the features we have on offer for you in this special BT 500 issue of the magazine. We won't blame you for that because it's quite a motley mix. There's one on Ranbaxy, another on Bharti Tele-Ventures, a third on a little-known company in Hyderabad called MosChip, one on ONGC, another about the recently privatised public sector companies and yet another one about three two-wheeler companies.

But look closer and you'll doubtless see the logic behind not merely profiling the top five or six companies on the BT 500 list but selecting others to write about. First, the few companies that we've culled out are all potential winners. Ranbaxy, if you hadn't noticed, has transformed itself to become India's first truly transnational company. Ranbaxy is betting massively on the US and other global markets and, by 2004, it expects at least 60 per cent of its turnover to come from overseas sales. Likewise, our feature on ONGC, which is, incidentally, the most valuable company (if you take the state-owned and private sector companies together), examines how the oil major is unlocking value. Even at MosChip, ranked at a lowly 429, there is a story that is unfolding; a story that many believe could be that of the next Infosys, albeit in the semiconductor industry.

In keeping with our penchant for innovation, we've tried to make the BT 500 list more contemporary this time: our rankings are based on average market capitalisation during the second half of 2002-03, i.e., April-September 2002. Of course, we also have the regular cache of data: average market capitalisation for the last financial year, assets, return on assets as well as return on capital employed.

For those of our readers who have been bombarded in recent times by corporate listings that consider assets or sales (some even prefer an amalgam of the two), there is a nugget in this issue that you ought not to miss. Read Free Market Fundamentals on Page 96, on why Business Today sticks to market capitalisation as the best measure of the value of a company.

As in the past, this time too we took the invaluable help of the Mumbai-based Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) to create the database for the BT 500 study. We began with a universe of 5,495 companies but considered only the ones that were traded on at least 20 per cent of the 128 trading days in the first half of the current year. And yet again, we have two separate rankings-one for the private sector companies and another for the state-owned ones.

Sanjoy Narayan