Infosys Technologies bagged the top position for 'overall leadership' for the second year running. The company was listed No 1 in Review 200: Asia's Leading Companies, the annual leadership survey conducted by the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER). Reliance took second place.
Hero Honda Motors, Dr Reddy's Laboratories and Larsen & Toubro follow Infosys and Reliance (in that order) in this year's survey.
Other companies in the top ten rankings include Ranbaxy Laboratories (no 7), ITC (no 8), Cipla (no 9) and ICICI (no 10).
Around 208 leading multinational corporations in Asia were ranked by FEER's prestigious review this year, conducted by the AC Nielsen International Research, Hong Kong.
In all, 1,943 people responded to the review, ranking between 26 and 39 companies each across 11 countries in Asia this year.
Of the respondents, 75 per cent people were FEER subscribers, while the rest were readers of its partner publications -- Australia's Business Review Weekly, India's Business India, and The Asian Wall Street Journal.
FEER credited Infosys for continuing to post strong growth rates in the IT sector, despite the tough business environment it finds itself in, and for consolidating its reputation as India's premier software firm.
Calling Reliance Industries "a colossus of the Indian private sector," the magazine said, "Its (Reliance's) reach extends from synthetic fibres to oil refining to insurance. Its most ambitious project, however, is in the telecommunications sector, where it has begun a bid to lay a nationwide fibre-optic network."
Infosys and Wipro are the only two technology companies to appear in the overall top ten, two pharma companies - Dr Reddy's Laboratories and Cipla - replaced Satyam and NIIT in last year's ranking.
While three companies slipped in their overall leadership ranking over last year -- Ranbaxy (from 5 to 7), ITC (from 6 to 8) and ICICI (from 4 to 10) -- two other companies climbed up in the rankings -- Hero Honda (from 9 to 4) and L&T (from 10 to 6).
In addition to overall leadership, each company was ranked according to the quality of products and services, the long-term vision of its management, its innovation in responding to customers' needs, its financial soundness and its status as a company that others try to emulate.
