The japanese are nice people but they are insane. Why do Panasonic make toilets?

Can I buy stocks in consulting companies specialized in restructuring please?

Actually almost every japanese corp has reported losses. I wouldnt exactly blame them all being run badly. The only outcome of all this is that japan is going to be losing more factories. Victims so far.. SONY backing out of large screen/ scale OLED production, panasonic probably killing plasma production sometime later this year.

So did Nissan and toyota.. and toyota is defntly NOT a badly run corporation. It hasnt shown a loss in the past 70 years. Its much bigger than microsoft n nintendo.

Umm.. by which standard toyota is much bigger than microsoft?

 ROFFLES. SRSLY? Microsoft is worth more than almost every car manufacturer combined. Thanks for the lawls.

The only companies that might, and I emphasize might, be bigger than Microsoft is Wal-Mart and Exxon Mobile

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Horrible, out of date list.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.

I don't think you understand the term "largest company". There are a lot of ways to measure how big a company is.

Some comparisons:

Revenue - Toyota at $214B vs MS at $61B

Enterprise Value - Toyota at $224B vs MS at $156B

Market Cap - Toyota at $116B MS at $180B

# Employees - Toyota at 320k people, MS at 91k people

So by 3 of those 4 measures, Toyota is MUCH bigger than MS. And FYI, most places consider "size" primarily based on revenue 1st (i.e. Fortune 500 rankings always based on revenue).

Maybe read a bit before saying other people are wrong.

The term "largest company" is going to fall into having no real meaning under your argument which if that is the best you have you should probably just go do something else.  If you believe terms have no meaning there is no point to discussion as what your saying could then mean anything.  The above post was a biased attempt to cover up for the fact that Toyota has shrunk since last March.  Either hedge your statement or pick the most recent relevant data point and use a real metric or you should be called on it.  If your going to insist on this entire line of argument that nothing means anything I will just assume you agree with me as there is not point in arguing the entire line of thought that words have no meaning and you can say whatever you want and it means whatever you want and reality agrees with you.  Exact meaning may not be possible but I think a better attempt than this can be made and that we do actually exchange real ideas and information.

Of your metrics I think you found a good one to measure the size of Toyota as larger than MS in EV.  I would usually only look at Market Cap but EV is also valid and the most recent measures are in the near term.  I may think it slightly biased in favor of Toyota, as I doubt all of their assets could really be liquidated to the values which accountants list them at but you do make a good point that by that measure they are larger.  Your other measures I find questionable as they are either difficult to quantify or have little interaction with a good idea of company size in terms which are relevant to measures of what makes a company viable.