Charter Communications is the top Fairfield County company on the 64th annual Fortune 500 list, placing 74th after coming in at 96th last year.
The Stamford company”™s new ranking was affected by its 2016 acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. With the combined entity rebranded under Spectrum to consumers, Charter experienced the second-most growth in revenue (up 43.4 percent to $41.58 billion) among Fortune 500 telecommunications companies, behind only Verizon, and grew its profit by 180.9 percent to $9.9 billion, the most out of all its rival companies.
Fortune noted that a merger with Sprint “could be in the cards” after the latter”™s parent company, SoftBank, purchased a 5 percent stake in Charter.
Other county-based companies on the Fortune 500 were Stamford”™s Synchrony Financial (173rd, up from 185th); Greenwich”™s XPO Logistics (186th, up from 191st); Norwalk”™s Booking Holdings, formerly The Priceline Group (229th, up from 268th); Danbury”™s Praxair (264th, up from 275th); and Norwalk”™s Xerox (291st, down from 162nd).
Also making the cut were Norwalk”™s Frontier Communications (325th, down from 313th); Norwalk”™s Emcor Group (368th, down from 360th); Greenwich”™s W.R. Berkley (369th, down from 354th); and Stamford”™s United Rentals (424th, up from 452nd).
Connecticut”™s highest-ranked company was Aetna Holdings in Hartford, which was up from 43rd to 49th.
Overall, the top three companies on the Fortune 500 were Walmart, headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, which repeated as No. 1 with revenues of $500.3 billion; Exxon Mobil, based in Irving, Texas, with revenues of $244.4 billion; and Berkshire Hathaway, headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, at $242.1 million.
