Forbes Middle East, a licensee of Forbes Media, has announced its first UAE 100 ranking at a gala event in Dubai, recognising the country’s top companies that have contributed in transforming the UAE into a thriving business hub.

The leading business magazine ranked the 50 biggest companies listed on the country’s stock exchanges and 50 private companies making an impact in the region. To qualify, the companies needed to have origins within the UAE.

First Abu Dhabi Bank tops the 50 public companies list. The banking and financial services giant was followed by Etisalat group, Emirates NBD, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and Emaar Properties to complete the top five.

Diversified business group Majid Al Futtaim topped the 50 Private Companies List. The conglomerate was followed by Al Ghurair Group, Al-Futtaim Group, Lulu Group International and Landmark Group to complete the top five.

Forbes Middle East had support from valued partners including Amicorp as Corporate Social Responsibility Partner; Thumbay Group as Strategic Partner; Skyline University College as Knowledge Partner; Aisha Alabbar Art Gallery as Exclusive Art Partner; ITL World as preferred Travel Partner; Global Hawk Imaging & Diagnostics as Support Partner; Gemini Property Developers as Support Partner and Qtickets (Nautica 360) as Support partner for the event.

For the Top 50 listed companies all the companies on the Dubai and Abu Dhabi stock markets were studied. Forbes ME excluded companies based outside the UAE. They were ranked on four important criteria—total assets, net profits, market capitalization (as of November 20, 2018) and revenues, with equal weights.

Forbes ME used cut-offs for every criterion, in which if a company scored below this cut-off, it received a score of zero in this criterion. The cut-offs were $301.8 million for market capitalization, $158.91 million for revenues, $24.6 million for net profits and $1.2 billion for total assets.

For the Top 50 Private Companies, the companies were ranked based on publicly available information that included but was not limited to the company websites, official social media platforms and other studies and documents as financial statements weren’t available. The companies were ranked on the basis of the number of employees in the company, number of countries that they operate in, the type of businesses they run as well as the number of sectors that they operate in, the age of the company and editorial points. Each criterion was assigned weights to come up with the final ranking. – TradeArabia News Service