For the 12th straight year, Georgia's top-performing public companies are a mix of large and small, old and new, high-profile and obscure — just the way the Georgia 100 was designed to be.

Take the Top 10 list.

EMAIL THIS PRINT THIS MOST POPULAR
WANT REPRINTS? Our authorized provider, ValeoIP, can reformat articles, with accompanying photos and graphics. Get more information on custom reprints -- and custom plaques.

The biggest company as measured by revenue is Beazer Homes USA, an Atlanta-based home builder with 2004 revenue of $3.91 billion.

The smallest is Intelligent Systems, a high-tech Norcross company that reported revenue of $22.3 million last year.

Both companies are at the top of the annual Georgia 100 list for another reason: performance, as measured by financial variables including revenue, profit growth and return on equity.

The word "performance" in this case refers to what a company's managers did with the resources they had in the economic and stock market environment they shared with competitors and other companies.

How to measure performance?

The trick, of course, is how to measure performance.

Fortune magazine does it by ranking companies according to revenue, which means its annual list is skewed toward large companies.

The smallest company by revenue on this year's Fortune 500, Cincinnati Financial, had revenue of $3.61 billion last year. (Beazer Homes, incidentally, had enough revenue last year to make the Fortune 500 for the first time in this year's list, at 473rd place.)

An alternative to revenue is to rank companies by percentage changes from year to year. While that may seem fair, it also gives small and very small companies an advantage, since they can post big percentage changes on comparatively small numbers.

Ranking companies by performance attempts to get around this problem with a mix of absolute and percentage variables.

It's not the purpose of the report to give bragging rights to companies at the top of the list, although that's been known to happen.

The information shown in this section is intended to be a starting point for an investor's money management. Investors are expected to do more homework before they add one or more of these companies to a portfolio — or delete them, as the case may be.

PricewaterhouseCoopers crunched data

The numbers in this list were assembled and analyzed by accountants in the Atlanta office of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, an international accounting and business consulting firm.

The data came from the companies' annual reports, or 10-K forms, filed each year with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In each case it was for fiscal 2004, whether or not it ended on Dec. 31.

The process began with a list of almost 200 publicly traded companies based in Georgia that met certain minimum standards for variables such as market value, frequency of trading and price history. Inevitably, some companies failed to file their relevant documents by the deadline set by the publication timetable, and they, too, are omitted, along with companies whose auditors had issued a going-concern opinion.

Some companies file late because of regulatory investigations or other legal matters, which make on-time reporting impossible.

Companies that went public for the first time in 2004, either through an initial public stock offering or a spinoff from another firm, were omitted, as were companies in Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Scores based on five weighted variables

For the universe of 152 companies that made the final cut, accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers applied five weighted variables to come up with the final ranking:

• Revenue, which represents 10 percent of the final score. For banks, revenue is determined by adding net interest income and noninterest income.

• Year-over-year revenue change (15 percent).

• Annual percent change in profit margin, based on net income available to common shareholders (15 percent).

• Return on equity (30 percent), or how much profit is produced on shareholders' investment.

• Total return for calendar 2004 (30 percent), or the change in stock price assuming any dividends were reinvested in the company's shares.

The companies were ranked for each of these measurements. The overall ranking was determined by totaling the five variable rankings for each company and dividing by five.

Unlike most scoring, smaller is better in this case — the lower the final score, the higher the rank.

Profit numbers used to rank the companies were from the companies' continuing operations, net of any preferred dividends, and excluding income or loss from discontinued operations or changes in accounting practices.

While total return was for calendar 2004, all other financial data were for the companies' fiscal years, even if different. In most — but not all — cases, that coincided with the calendar year.

Only 100 companies are included in the overall performance list in the AJC's print version, but the other companies in the universe of 152 companies appear online.