Tabla de contenidos para June/July 2020 en Fortune

BY MID-MAY Brazil was being ravaged by a brutal epidemic. COVID-19, which had already infected some 8% of the population, was beginning to swarm through the teeming cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. But it was a different scourge—a bone-crushing disease called dengue—that had already sickened nearly 700,000 Brazilians this year. In the state of Mato Grosso do Sul (in Portuguese, the name means “Thick Bushes of the South”), a local newspaper reported a spate of recent dengue cases. Five thousand miles away, in Boston, a machine-learning program plucked the news from an Internet site, mined the text (in Portuguese) for keywords suggesting an outbreak, and posted an “alert” on HealthMap—an online global disease warning system developed by epidemiologists at Boston Children’s Hospital. On any given day,…

WHEN THERE’S blood in the water, sharks start to circle. And when companies’ stock charts flash bright red, as the vast majority have done in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, activist investors are more likely to bite. Activists operate by amassing big stakes in companies and using the resulting leverage to pressure management to change strategy, often in ways designed to deliver quick returns to shareholders. Lower share prices, of course, make the first part of the strategy easier to execute. In 2007 and 2008, years when stocks plunged as a result of the financial crisis and Great Recession, the number of activist campaigns ticked up sharply. The pattern may well repeat itself amid the chaos wreaked by COVID-19. The price/earnings ratio of the S&P 500 has tumbled from…

CALL IT A MARSHMALLOW TEST for executives: During the novel coronavirus pandemic, how long can a business leader keep his or her organization functioning under emergency protocols before the urge to resume normal operations becomes too great to ignore? Though the curve of global COVID-19 cases is flattening (and the economic pain of mitigating its spread beyond comprehension), the risks of prematurely reopening for business are too great to entertain. That is to say: No one wants to show up early to the post-pandemic party. We need only let history be our guide. Most deaths from the 1918 Spanish flu, which infected about a third of the world’s population, arose from a “second wave” of infections, when troop movements during World War I undermined nations’ efforts to mitigate the disease…

SOURCE: FACTSET RESEARCH SYSTEMS SPEAKING TO WALL STREET IN late April, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey followed the example of a growing number of his peers and did something previously unusual for a Fortune 500 leader: He threw up his hands. Forecasting the beverage giant’s results in the months ahead, the chief executive declared, was well-nigh impossible. “We recognize that these are truly unprecedented times,” said Quincey, on the company’s first-quarter earnings call. “Given the great uncertainty of the current environment, we feel it’s prudent to hold off providing fiscal-year 2020 guidance.” This spring, more than 100 companies in the S&P 500 that regularly provide earnings guidance—including IBM, Intel, and Kimberly-Clark—have said they won’t attempt to forecast results for 2020. Putting a number on just how badly the coronavirus crisis will…

FOR SHEER SCOPE AND SCALE, New York City still towers above all other U.S. metropolises as a business hub. This year’s Fortune 500 features 65 companies headquartered in the greater New York area, with a cumulative total of nearly $1.8 trillion in revenue—equal to 12.5% of the 500 overall. Second-place Dallas, meanwhile, got a major boost last year when drug distributor McKesson, No. 8 on the 500 list with $214 billion in sales, relocated its headquarters from San Francisco to tax-friendly Texas. But the combined clout of the tech economy continues to grow. The Fortune 500 companies based in America’s three biggest tech towns—San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle—had total sales of $2.04 trillion in 2019. That’s enough to surpass even New York.…

WHEN KRISTIN PECK became CEO of Zoetis in January, the animal health company was growing rapidly, thanks in part to steady growth in spending on pets. Just a few weeks later, coronavirus lockdowns turned the global economy upside down. But they also prompted Americans to adopt pets in record numbers, enabling Zoetis and Peck to face their first big crisis with what you might call a tailwind. Zoetis, which makes medicines, vaccines, and other products, was spun off from Pfizer in 2013 and joined the Fortune 500 in 2019. (It’s now No. 472.) It’s the market-share leader in “companion” animal health, with 22% of the market, and in several livestock categories too. With the pandemic doing only minor damage so far to commercial livestock or pet spending, Zoetis’s business…

IF YOU WERE designing a company from scratch that could capitalize on a global crisis, it would probably look a lot like Amazon. A fearsome operating machine that inspires equal measures of dread and admiration throughout the business world, the $280-billion-in-sales tech behemoth can react with the speed of the nimblest startup when challenged. Look no further than the company’s response this year to the coronavirus, which founder and CEO Jeff Bezos described to shareholders in late April as “the hardest time we’ve ever faced.” Amazon’s leadership team recognized early on that the pandemic could be a historically disruptive event. And Bezos, who’d been spending one day a week at his rocket company, Blue Origin, quickly became more involved in Amazon’s operations, meeting daily with his “S” (for senior)…

NOTHING HAS EVER been typical about Uber. A maverick at birth, Uber embraced rule-breaking as a business model, what with its catch-us-if-you-can flouting of local regulators. It expanded globally long before it saturated its home market. It lost money nearly as quickly as it raised it. The startup changed out its CEO and much of its management team, and then its board of directors—all before becoming a public company. Now, in its first year of eligibility and only the 11th of its existence, Uber has joined the Fortune 500. Given the devastating effects on its revenue of a global pandemic that has pummeled its passenger-trip volumes by 80%, Uber might well fall off the list next year—which certainly wouldn’t be typical. Indeed, as a result of the crisis, Uber…

BEFORE EXECUTIVES at paper-goods giant Kimberly-Clark rushed to shut their offices on Friday the 13th of March, they convened for one last emergency meeting. Commuting home that final time, Arist Mastorides, president of family care for North America, stopped at his local Walmart, on the edge of Lake Winnebago in Neenah, Wis., to see the emergency firsthand. Mastorides oversees toilet paper brands like Cottonelle and Scott, but that evening he could find none of his own products. “A long gondola shelf that’s completely empty of bathroom and facial tissue, I never in my life thought I would ever see that,” he says. “That’s a very unsettling thing.” Indeed, that week will be remembered for the Great Toilet Paper Panic of 2020. The previous day, March 12, TP sales had…

METHODOLOGY Companies are ranked by total revenues for their respective fiscal years. Included in the survey are companies that are incorporated in the U.S. and operate in the U.S. and file financial statements with a government agency. This includes private companies and cooperatives that file a 10-K or a comparable financial statement with a government agency, and mutual insurance companies that file with state regulators. It also includes companies that file with a government agency but are owned by private companies, domestic or foreign, that do not file such financial statements. Excluded are private companies not filing with a government agency; companies incorporated outside the U.S.; and U.S. companies consolidated by other companies, domestic or foreign, that file with a government agency. Also excluded are companies that failed to…

COMPANY PROFITS, BY INDUSTRY ON THE FAST TRACK WHILE AUTO SAFETY SUPPLIER AUTOLIV IS TECHNICALLY A U.S. COMPANY, THE PROFIT-MINTING SEATBELT AND AIRBAG MAKER IS BASED IN STOCKHOLM. SALESFORCE.COM CONTINUES TO RIDE THE GROWTH OF THE CLOUD-COMPUTING MARKET, WHICH IS SET TO HIT $330 BILLION IN 2020. ELECTRIC-CAR LEADER TESLA HAS YET TO MAKE AN ANNUAL PROFIT, BUT ITS SALES HAVE RISEN SEVENFOLD IN FIVE YEARS TO $25 BILLION. FASTEST-GROWING COMPANIES BRINGING IN THE BUCKS APPLE WAS KNOCKED OUT OF THE TOP SPOT IN PROFITS AFTER A FIVE-YEAR REIGN, BUT THE IPHONE MAKER EARNED MORE THAN $50 BILLION IN NET INCOME FOR THE THIRD TIME IN FIVE YEARS, FOR A TOTAL OF $262 BILLION OVER THAT SPAN. VISA AND MASTERCARD CHARGED TO THE TOP IN PROFIT EFFICIENCY. MOST PROFITABLE COMPANIES…

Peter Schwartz has spent five decades studying the balance between risk and opportunity. As the head of scenario planning for oil giant Royal Dutch Shell, as a consultant on movies such as the sci-fi thriller Minority Report and disaster epic Deep Impact, and since 2011 as the senior vice president for strategic planning at cloud software phenomenon Salesforce.com, the 73-year-old has devoted his career to peering past the noise of the present to focus on the future. But never before has he seen a risk scenario as unpredictable and confusing as the coronavirus crisis. “I’ve been doing this since 1972,” says Schwartz. “This is the greatest level of uncertainty I’ve seen—ever. I’ve been through the oil crises of the 1970s, several financial crises, the attacks of 9/11, and two…

AS THE WORLD screeched to a halt in the middle of March, there was one place where I could still find normality: Instagram. My family was there—my mom sharing her latest artwork; my brother’s shots of his new baby—as were my friends, both real and aspirational. (DM me anytime, Chrissy Teigen!) But now I could also find a favorite fitness instructor teaching his usual Saturday barre class on Instagram Live, the stylists from my Brooklyn hair salon posting bang-trim tutorials, and the chefs of many of New York’s most beloved restaurants leading IGTV cooking lessons from home kitchens not so different from my own. Almost overnight, the life I used to lead in, well, life, had relocated to Instagram. And that wasn’t the only change happening in my Instagram…

VANGUARD CEO Tim Buckley sees his firm’s Net Promoter Score every time he looks at the management dashboard on his screen. Bill Barton, CEO of California Closets, checks his company’s score first thing every morning and has built his highly successful business on it. Intuit product managers check their score every day and have been using it since it was invented 17 years ago. Some 40,000 employees use it at IBM, and the executive who oversees its use, Michelle Peluso, says, “It’s more than a metric. One could use the word ‘religion.’” All this devotion for a particular measure of customer sentiment? It may seem bizarre, but the phenomenon is real and growing. At least two-thirds of the Fortune 1000 use the Net Promoter Score, including most or all of…

THIRTY-THREE YEARS before her death, Paulette Parr visited her doctor for a popular and relatively routine procedure. It was 1986, and Parr was 35, working in human resources at the local hospital in Sikeston, a 16,000-person Missouri enclave midway between St. Louis and Memphis. A married mother of two young boys, she was interested in what plastic surgeons still call a “mommy makeover,” a catchall for the various procedures that nip, tuck, and lift women back to a pre-childbirth shape. For Parr, that meant getting her first set of breast implants. For the next 15 years, through losing her first husband and remarrying and getting promoted to her hospital’s purchasing department, Parr was mostly happy with her implants, and with how they made her look and feel. But they…

¶ Includes revenues from discontinued operations. C A cooperative. E Excise taxes have been deducted. L A limited liability company. P A partnership. R A real estate investment trust. 1 Figures are for fiscal year ended Jan. 31, 2020. 2 Figures are for fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2019. 3 Acquired Diplomat Pharmacy (2018 rank: 507), Feb. 10, 2020. 4 Figures are for fiscal year ended March 31, 2019. 5 Figures are for fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2019. 6 Figures are for fiscal year ended June 30, 2019. 7 Company’s senior preferred stock is owned by the U.S. Treasury, which also holds a warrant to purchase 79.9% of the common stock. 8 Company reduced ownership interest in Baker Hughes (2019 rank: 129) from 50.2% to 36.8%, Sept. 16,…

Company (Rank) Industry number ABBOTT LABORATORIES (104) 40 ABBVIE (99) 48 ABM INDUSTRIES (462) 14 ACTIVISION BLIZZARD (463) 18 ADOBE (285) 10 ADVANCE AUTO PARTS (330) 57 ADVANCED MICRO DEVICES (448) 55 AECOM (163) 17 AES (310) 63 AFLAC (146) 35 AGCO (350) 12 AIR PRODUCTS & CHEMICALS (355) 8 AK STEEL HOLDING (467) 41 ALASKA AIR GROUP (360) 3 ALBERTSONS (55) 20 ALCOA (302) 41 ALLEGHANY (351) 37 ALLIANCE DATA SYSTEMS (456) 19 ALLSTATE (72) 37 ALLY FINANCIAL (273) 13 ALPHABET (11) 38 ALTICE USA (327) 58 ALTRIA GROUP (167) 60 AMAZON.COM (2) 38 AMEREN (488) 63 AMERICAN AIRLINES GROUP (70) 3 AMERICAN AXLE & MFG. (460) 43 AMERICAN ELECTRIC POWER (204) 63 AMERICAN EXPRESS (67) 13 AMERICAN FAMILY INS. GROUP (254) 37 AMERICAN FINANCIAL GROUP (383) 37 AMERICAN…