The companies at the top of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's 14th annual Georgia 100 turned in spectacular performances last year.

Big companies dominated, as measured by a five-variable formula. Six of the 10 had market values of more than $1 billion, with energy producer Mirant at the top with $11.77 billion.

David Tulis/AJC (ENLARGE)

IntercontinentalExchange Chief Executive Jeffrey Sprecher has launched a bid to buy the Chicago Board of Trade, trying to displace a deal already in place with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Joey Ivansco/AJC (ENLARGE)

A section of the Titanic's twisted hull is lifted into place by workers for Premier Exhibitions, which handles the traveling exhibit of the luxury ship that sank on its maiden voyage 95 years ago.

The 10 had an average market value of approximately $3.2 billion.

Collectively, they reported $10.63 billion in revenue for an average of $1.06 billion, and posted an average year-over-year profit gain of 33.8 percent on a 39.2 percent average revenue increase.

Their shareholders also did well. The average total return of the Top 10 was 41.7 percent. The Standard & Poor's 500 stock index advanced 13.6 percent in 2006.

Energy, health care, real estate and telecommunications industries dominated the Top 10 this year, maintaining the list's history of diversity by sector and by size.

The top performer, Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange, is a computerized, global commodity exchange where billions worth of crude oil, electricity, coal and agricultural futures contracts are traded by the millisecond. It is best known by its stock symbol, ICE.

The company in 2007 currently finds itself in a bidding contest to buy the Chicago Board of Trade, a 159-year-old commodity exchange, for approximately $10 billion.

ICE is competing for the CBOT against the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which had already agreed last year to a merger with CBOT. In the latest development, the Chicago Merc responded to the ICE offer by upping its original bid of roughly $8 billion to about $9.2 billion.

But in its response, ICE repeated its belief that its offer to buy the CBOT is a better deal all around than the enhanced Chicago Merc offer. At press time, shareholders of the CBOT and Chicago Merc had not yet voted on their merger proposal, and the marketplace awaited the next move by ICE.

ICE has been successful in its acquisition moves in the past, starting with the purchase of a London exchange in 2001 and the New York Board of Trade early this year.

One reason for the company's top-ranking performance was the 197 percent total stock market return last year. Just as important, the company posted a 59 percent increase in net income on a 101 percent year-over-year advance in revenue.

The second-place company on the Georgia 100 has raised the Titanic, so to speak.

Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions creates and assembles exhibitions that literally travel the world. The most famous is a moving museum of artifacts retrieved from the legendary Titanic, the luxury liner that hit an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage 95 years ago.

President and Chief Executive Arnie Geller paid tribute last month to the Titanic on the anniversary of its sinking in a ceremony at the Nasdaq Stock Market, where the company's shares are traded. Another achievement for Geller was to finally open the Titanic Exhibition in Atlanta, his hometown.

The company's other major exhibition, "Bodies," an extraordinary anatomical display, attracted 350,000 people last year to the Civic Center, which was also where the Titanic exhibition was located.

The No. 3 company, Mirant, is an independent producer of electricity. The Atlanta-based company emerged from bankruptcy early last year and went on to record a sharp increase in fourth-quarter and annual income.

Mirant and ICE have something in common: Both were affected by the collapse of Enron, the independent Houston energy company whose name has become synonymous with corporate greed and scandal.

While ICE benefited from Enron's failure by propping up the energy market that Enron's collapse had threatened, Mirant was badly damaged. Hurt by Enron-related credit downgrades, Mirant was forced to file for Chapter 11 protection in July 2003, and emerged in January 2006. Mirant has since announced that it is considering other options, including putting itself on the block.

Anyone who has donated blood has unknowingly encountered fourth-ranked Immucor. The company manufactures and sells reagents and systems used by blood donor centers, hospitals and laboratories worldwide. The company's products are used to detect and identify certain properties of cell and serum components in blood prior to transfusion.

Immucor's shareholders have good reason to be pleased. An investor who owned shares in that company at the time the stock market bubble burst in March 2000 would have made money. Immucor shares have risen 1,915 percent since that date, the best performance among Georgia-based companies over that period. The stock continued to advance during 2006, posting a market-beating total return of 88 percent.

Transcend Services, in fifth place, occupies another niche in the health care industry — records and record-keeping for hospitals and other health care providers.

The company created an Internet-based voice-to-text system that allows doctors and other medical personnel to produce medical documents. The operations include record management, transcriptions of medical notes dictated by doctors, consulting materials and software products related to managing patient information.

"Roughly 20 percent of the company's total volume is now edited using speech-recognition technology," Sue McGrogan, senior vice president of operations, said in releasing the company's quarterly financials.

She also said that offshore work, "which was almost nonexistent until the third quarter of 2006, now represents approximately 7 percent of total company volume."

Thanks to the next two companies in the Top 10, we can keep in touch with each other pretty much wherever we are. Sixth-place Arris Group makes telecommunications equipment, and seventh-place Superior Essex makes wire and cable products.

Arris designs and engineers equipment and components that make it possible to transmit voice and data in high-speed networks, and in television broadcasting. Its markets are mainly cable operators and local and long-distance telephone companies.

Arris is a repeat performer, also ranking sixth on last year's Georgia 100. And under its former identity as Antex, it ranked third on the Georgia 100 published in 2000, based on 1999 operations.

Superior Essex makes wire and cable products used in automobiles, televisions, computers, telephones, motors and other items. Its products are sold to original-equipment manufacturers, regional phone companies and independent telecom companies.

The company has been in an acquisition mode, and recently announced the purchase of SpA Invex, a European wire producer, and Nexans SA, a Canadian magnet wire operation.

The "green revolution" is central to No. 8 Neenah Paper, headquartered in Alpharetta. The company emphasizes its use of recycled papers in producing a wide variety of premium and specialty papers, the kind companies use to project prestige images.

Neenah Paper posted strong financial numbers in 2006 and has continued to expand this year. In March it announced the purchase of Fox Valley Corp., which owns Fox River Paper Co., a producer of premium fine papers.

At No. 9, Atlanta-based Cousins Properties can make a legitimate claim to helping shape the skylines of Atlanta and other cities. A real estate investment trust, Cousins is also a developer of office and other commercial buildings, mostly in the South.

And business has been good. Cousins reported that its 2006 net income rose more than 500 percent in what the company's chief executive, Thomas Bell Jr., called "one of our best years ever." Cousins' 2006 year-end net income was $216.6 million, or $4.13 a share, up sharply over its 2005 year-end net income of $34.5 million, or 67 cents a share.

Acuity Brands, at No. 10, also reported sharp profit growth for both its fourth quarter and full fiscal year. The Atlanta-based lighting and chemicals manufacturer said net profit for the year was $106.6 million, or $2.34 a share, more than double 2005's result of $52.2 million.

Net sales for the year rose to $2.39 billion, up 10 percent from 2005.

The company said lighting sales were boosted by a combination of factors that included greater demand in nonresidential construction markets.