The companies in this year’s 500 list slashed costs so fast and so deeply especially labor that even in a feeble recovery, their earnings soared.
The long-awaited recovery is now under way, but it’s a slow, painful slog that’s short on trust and confidence and long on a drumbeat of numbers that mostly shift from dreadful to less depressing. Twenty-seven months after the recession began, unemployment is stuck at 9.7%. Housing starts are dragging near half-century lows. Consumers are finally spending again, but they’re still too fearful about their jobs and homes to crowd malls and auto lots with the buoyant abandon that heralds a full-rigged revival, the kind Americans are used to.
Amazingly, as consumers struggle, U.S. corporations are staging a nearly unprecedented comeback that’s largely escaping notice. The gargantuan, dispiriting job cuts that seem to dominate the news have also been the spur for an epic resurgence in profits. For 2009, the Fortune 500 lifted earnings 335%, to $391 billion, a $301 billion jump that’s the second largest in the list’s 56-year history, approaching the increase in the robust recovery of 2003. For last year the 500 raised their return on sales from less than 1% to 4%. That’s close to the list’s 4.7% historical average.
Hence, the 500’s profits virtually returned to normal after years of extremes — bubbles in 2006 and 2007, collapse in 2008 — despite a feeble overall recovery that’s far from normal. This year’s list — reminder: the Fortune 500 ranks U.S. companies by revenue — is packed with changes that reflect and spotlight the trends reshaping corporate America. The homebuilders that occupied 14 places in 2007 and three last year, including Centex and Pulte, have all disappeared, casualties of shrinking sales. No fewer than nine newcomers from recession-resistant health care joined in 2009, among them drugmakers Genzyme (sales: $4.5 billion) and Allergan ($4.5 billion). (more…)
