Fortune Selects 50 Firms with Best Growth Prospects
Three Korean companies, including Naver (6th), Celltrion (17th), and Samsung BioLogics (47th), has made it to this year’s Future 50 list, a collection of companies poised for explosive growth compiled by Fortune magazine with the help of BCG.
While last year’s Future 50 only included U.S. companies, this year’s list encompasses the largest public companies with excellent growth prospects both in the U.S. and abroad.
Notably, Naver ranks higher than global IT companies such as Netflix (8th), Alibaba (14th), Amazon (29th), and the alphabet (32nd).
Fortune introduced Naver as a Korean tech giant that had established an early lead in its home market for search and other Internet services and is poised to extend its reach in cloud services and payment processing.
Regarding Naver's Japanese subsidiary LINE that makes a popular chat app, Fortune said the company “recently capitalized on a hot trend, introducing a rewards-points-like cryptocurrency called LINK that people can use to buy and sell game-related content.” It added Facebook’s struggles create an opening for Naver to capture more chat market share.
"It is meaningful that Naver has been recognized as a promising company that will lead the global IT market in the future," a Naver official said.
Fortune described Celltrion as a company that “creates biosimilar versions of some of Big Pharma’s best-selling biologic drugs, posing a challenge to giants like Johnson & Johnson and Roche.”
A Celltrion official said, "Fortune rated highly Celltrion’s future value as global sales of its self-developed biosimilar products are increasing.” Celltrion is set to launch its products in the U.S. market share, where a favorable environment is being created for biosimilar products.
A Samsung BioLogics official said that the company was highly appreciated by Fortune for having the largest number of biosimilar pipelines in the world. Its sales were lowest among the 50.
The top spot in this year’s Future 50 was taken by Workday, a software company specializing in cloud-based enterprise human resources and financial management products.