World: Medium of the Week - Forbes broadens its scope with Top 2000 survey.

Forbes is trying to supply an international focus with its survey, Mark Tungate writes.

'Some think small,' the flyer Forbes sent out to media agencies and advertisers recently said. 'Forbes sees the bigger picture.'

The flyer was referring to the Forbes 2000 survey of the world's leading companies, but it was also a subtle dig at the business publication's biggest rival, Fortune. When it launched the 2000 survey last year, Forbes was clearly trying to go one better (or, when you think about it, four better) than the Fortune 500 ranking of the biggest US companies.

This year, Forbes is placing even more emphasis on the global 2000 survey, having scrapped its own 500 list of US companies after 36 years. Alongside the World's Billionaires issue - an annual list of the richest people on the planet, which appears every March - the 2000 survey is now the most important date in the Forbes calendar. It will appear simultaneously in the US edition, which has been going for more than 85 years, and the international version, Forbes Global, which launched in 1998. Both are owned by the Forbes family and headed by its chief executive and the former US presidential candidate, Steve Forbes, the son of the late publisher Malcolm S Forbes.

Forbes Global's managing director and publisher, Bob Crozier, says: 'While our worthy competitor Fortune continues to focus on the top 500 companies in America, we feel that this has become an outdated concept. The world economy depends on a large number of companies that are based outside of the US - in China, for example, or Finland in the case of Nokia - and our survey reflects that shift.'

The list is based on four main criteria: revenue, profit, assets, and market capitalisation. Price-to-earnings ratio is also taken into account. In last year's survey, eight out of the top 20 companies in the survey were non-American.