if you thought SONY's losses were bad.....

[smallflyingtaco]

arsenicazure said:
sigh.. here we go

The Fortune Global 500 is a ranking of the top 500 corporations worldwide as measured by revenue. The list is compiled and published annually by Fortune magazine.


This is the top 10 as published in July 2008. It is based on the companies' fiscal year ended on or before 31 March 2008.[1]

1. Wal Mart - United States (retail)
2. ExxonMobil Corporation - United States (oil)
3. Royal Dutch Shell - Netherlands [2] (oil)
4. BP - United Kingdom (oil)
5. Toyota Motor - Japan (automobiles)
6. Chevron - United States (oil)
7. ING Group - Netherlands (banking)
8. Total - France (oil)
9. General Motors - United States (automobiles)
10. ConocoPhillips - United States (oil)

The top ten includes six oil companies, two automobile manufacturers, one retailer, and one banking corporation. The complete list is available online.

Now i dont see microsoft on this list.. So while microsoft is worth more (asset wise,than toyota), its barely 1/4th in terms of REVENUE (60 billion vs 262 billion USD)..2008 figure.

And if microsoft is so big n so profitable.. then why the hell did it lay off 5000 ppl in a phased manner?

Simple point is, all the japanese companies are bleeding, especially the electronic divisions.. but compared to the billions that panasonic and Hitachi has squandered.. SONY's loss of 1.5 billion doesnt look so bad. Especially since we all know how horrible the ps3 has been for them.

Horrible, out of date list.  You picked a time in the middle of last summer which is why it has all those oil companies.  Toyota is in the list at that time and probably had been bigger than MS since about 2006 but it is not today, it was not during the 90s and a lot of the first half of 2000.  It picked up in the later half of the 2000s as the Japanese economy started to pickup but it is back down to about 2/3 the size of MS today.