PROVIDENCE – The diverging fortunes of Rhode Island’s two Fortune 500 companies were on stark display when the magazine released its annual list of America’s largest companies on Thursday.
CVS Caremark Corp. moved up one spot on the list to No. 18 as its annual sales reached $98.7 billion. The Woonsocket-based pharmacy giant jumped from No. 51 to No. 24 on the list two years ago after it merged with Caremark Rx Inc.
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Textron Inc., on the other hand, slid 47 spots on the list to No. 220. Its annual sales fell 25 percent to $10.5 billion last year.
At No. 220, Textron’s ranking this year is its lowest on the Fortune 500 since the magazine’s very first list in 1955, when the Providence-based conglomerate was at No. 292.
Topping this year’s Fortune 500 was Wal-Mart Stores Inc. ($408.2 billion in revenue), followed by Exxon Mobil Corp. ($284.7 billion) – reversing last year’s top two. Rounding out the top five were Chevron Corp. ($163.5 billion), General Electric Co. ($156.8 billion) and Bank of America Corp. ($150.5 billion).
Figures compiled by the magazine also shed some light on why the U.S. labor market remains so depressed. The 500 companies cut a record 821,000 jobs last year even as their collective profit jumped more than threefold to $391 billion, according to Fortune.
The companies’ deep cost-cutting was more than enough to offset an 8.7 percent drop in sales, the largest decline since 1983.
CVS has been moving up the Fortune 500 steadily in recent years. The company has been in the top 100 every year since 1999, when it was No. 99 on the list.
“We are proud to deliver quality pharmacy health care services to millions of consumers and health plan members,” CVS Chairman, President and CEO Tom Ryan said in a statement.
Textron, on the other hand, has been sliding down the list. The company made the top 100 every year from 1963 to 1980, peaking at No. 47 in 1969, and returned to the top 100 from 1986 to 1994.
In 2005, Textron fell out of the top 200 for the first time since 1955, and did so again in 2008 and this year.
Additional information is available at money.cnn.com.
