How We Did It

This is Business Today's fifth edition of India's Fastest Growing Companies. We have included both listed and unlisted companies in our survey. But unlike last year, the revenue benchmarks have been changed to Rs 1,000 crore and above. The study has been done using the Ace Equity database and the years under consideration include FY2014/15, 2015/16 and 2016/17. To date, very few companies have filed their 2017/18 annual reports, and those numbers are beyond the scope of this study.

We have considered growth in total income as our primary evaluation criterion. Total income has been calculated as net sales (gross sales - interdivisional transfers - sales returns and - excise duty). All total income and profit numbers (operating profits) are standalone. A series of filters have also been introduced at this stage. Trading companies and those in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) segment have been excluded from the study as their incomes are handled differently. Moreover, the objective is to concentrate on companies which have generated profits from their operations. Therefore, we have considered only those companies which have made operating profits during the years mentioned.

After these eliminations, the remaining companies were taken to the next stage. As a first step, data of companies with non-12 month accounting periods (only data between nine and 15 months was considered) was annualised to achieve a fair comparison. We were left with 647 companies for final evaluation.

For evaluation, we have calculated three-year compounded annual growth rate, or CAGR, and the average of the three periods of year-on-year (YoY) growth in total income as average growth can capture the peaks and troughs in between growth periods. The final ranking is based on the average of YoY growth.

We have split the companies into four revenue groups. These are Super (companies with total income of Rs 1 lakh crore and above), Large (companies with total income between Rs 50,000 crore and Rs 1 lakh crore), Medium (companies with total income of Rs 10,000-50,000 crore) and Small (Rs 1,000 crore to Rs 10,000 crore). None in the super large group - which were all oil companies - showed revenue growth for all three years. The reverse was the case of the small companies, all of which showed exponential growth because of their small bases. For a detailed explanation, refer to page 28.