British telecoms group Vodafone is ranked as the biggest loss-maker on Fortune magazine's top 500 performing corporations in 2000.
Vodafone scraped the bottom of Fortune's ranking, with its 14.4 billion dollars losses, beating Canadian telecoms equipment maker Nortel Networks to last place.
Canadian power company Pacific Gas and Electricity, British Telecom and British insurance company CGNU and Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi followed on in the list of the top 10 losers worldwide.
With the rise in oil prices and consolidation of the oil sector in the last few years, American ExxonMobil, along with Anglo-Dutch company Royal Dutch Shell, and Britain's BP found themselves at the top of the list of performers in revenue and profit terms.
Chinese industrial groups Sinopec, State Power and China National Petroleum all rose in Fortune's ranks of the top 100 groups worldwide.
ExxonMobil rose above the 200 billion dollar revenue threshold, ahead of US retail giant Wal-Mart, which is the world's biggest employer with more than a million staff.
Auto manufacturers were also among the top 10 worldwide in revenues earned -General Motors was in third place, Ford was at number four, DaimlerChrysler came fifth place and Toyota was at number 10. They disappeared from the top of the list, however, when it came to profits.
Six American groups dominated the top 10 companies as profit-makers, namely: ExxonMobil, Citigroup, General Electric, Verizon, Intel and Microsoft, along with four European groups: Royal Dutch Shell, BP, ING Group and Philips.
In Europe, DaimlerChrysler, Royal Dutch Shell and BP were the most profitable companies, followed by TotalFinaElf and Axa of France.