Walmart 11th on Fortune’s “Most Admired” list

The March issue of Fortune contains the magazine’s annual ranking of the most admired companies and this year’s list shows Walmart slipped two spots from the prior year and now occupies the 11 position.

Those ranked ahead of Walmart on the list include top ranked Apple, followed by Google, Berkshire Hathaway, Southwest Airlines, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Amazon.com, FedEx, Microsoft and McDonald’s. Walmart was the highest ranked retailer on the list which also included, Nordstrom (21), Target (22), Costco (29), Best Buy (36), eBay (45) and Lowe’s (49).

To produce the list Fortune works with the Hay Group who starts with about 1,400 companies whose revenues exceed $10 billion. Hay Group sorts them by industry and selects the 15 largest for each international industry and the 10 largest for each U.S. industry. A total of 667 companies from 33 countries were surveyed. To create the 55 industry lists, Hay asks executives, directors, and analysts to rate companies in their own industry on nine criteria, from investment value to social responsibility. To arrive at the top 50 Most Admired Companies overall, the Hay Group asked 4,170 executives, directors, and securities analysts who responded to the industry surveys to select the 10 companies they admired most. They chose from a list made up of the companies that ranked in the top 25% in last year's surveys, plus those that finished in the top 20% of their industry.