Annual Sales $9 billion

Rank 12th (Revenue greater than $5 billion)

Average Five-Year Score Improvement 17th (down 0.2%)

The accounting rules that companies have to abide by can skew their real performance, as was the case with ITT this year. ITT closed on its $1.7-billion acquisition of EDO Corp. last Dec. 20. Under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, all of EDO's assets were immediately loaded onto ITT's balance sheet, but it was only able to count a few days of EDO's sales and profits in its annual results. Had the acquisition closed two weeks later, ITT would have placed several spots higher in the TPC rankings.