Fiscal 2008-09 can easily go down
in history as the worst year global businesses witnessed since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Stories of bankruptcies, scams and collapses dominated the headlines, be it print or electronic media or the World Wide Web. Beginning October that year, as Lehman Brothers took one last breath, it became clear that the US financial catastrophe would stymie businesses in even far-flung economies like India and China. The Economic Survey 2008-09 sums up it well when it observes, “The industrial sector witnessed a sharp slowdown during 2008-09 as a consequence of successive shocks, the most important being the knock-on effects of the global financial crisis.” But thanks to the timely intervention by policy makers and regulators, notably the Reserve Bank of India, Indian businesses exhibited remarkable resilience and braved and fought the worst economic crisis in modern times quite well. The performances for the Financial Year (FY) 2008-09 say it all. The Analyst 500 brings you insights from a financial year which was challenging to the fullest and as to how India Inc. successfully weathered the storm. Read on...
Even as talks of the tremor hitting some Indian corporates gathered momentum, India Inc, more or less, remained largely unscathed, though exports got hit badly and the impact was quite severe in the textiles sector, IT industry managed to scrape through. Given that, full marks go to the sector. While it would be unfair to expect a repetition of the sterling performances companies delivered during the last few fiscals, the performances this year nevertheless were not bad either. A glance at The Analyst 500 clearly shows that a majority of the players have managed to churn in reasonably good numbers. A fact that is best illustrated by our top 10 rankers this year who have managed to more or less deliver good figures during the period under study. Expectedly, the pecking order, as far as the top 10 ranks are concerned, remains unchanged but for one: ICICI Bank slips down one rank to the ninth place, while NTPC moves up a place to No.8. The top 10 ranks expectedly are once again dominated by the public sector giants, which occupy 8 out of the top 10 rankings.
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