Analysis of global manufacturing top 200: applications of Zipf-Mandelbrot law and its transposing type

Analysis of global manufacturing and management continues to be popular with academic researchers and industrial practitioners. Based on Fortune Global 500, this paper generalizes Global Manufacturing Top 200 in 2006 and in 2005. Then the research probes into the relation that the company’s revenues are influenced by the rank change, and yields the Zipf-Mandelbrot law, which is an inverse power expression. Furthermore, in order to estimate the effect on rank of a change in revenues, this paper puts forward a more valuable and newer thought— transposing the independent and dependent variables of Zipf-Mandelbrot law, and the resulting estimated equation is also an inverse power expression actually. The research results show that, dealing with the rank of Global Manufacturing Top 200, we must notice the “inverse power effect” of the rank’s alteration: when rank is top, it is harder to be raised or dropped; when rank is low, it is easier to be changed.