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Backgrounder: Fortune Global Forum

     The '99 Fortune Global Forum is to be held in Shanghai from September 27 to 29, with a theme of "China: the Next 50 Years."
     This meeting will be the largest in the history of the Fortune Global Forum. More than 800 delegates from both at home and abroad will attend the meeting.
     Among the attendants are 300 chairmen of the board, presidents and chief executive officers (CEOs) of multinational companies, including those from 60 of the top 500 enterprises in the world and some conglomerates in the United States, Europe and Asia- Pacific. Other attendants include celebrities in the economic and political circles.
     The heads of 200 large-sized Chinese enterprises and many high- ranking officials from the central and local governments of China will also participate in the forum. Nearly 600 journalists from Chinese and international media will be in Shanghai to cover the meeting.
     The Fortune Global Forum is an annual forum for world economic magnates to discuss the issues that global businesses face. It is held by the Fortune magazine under the Time-Warner Group of the U. S..
     The sub-themes of this year's forum include "draw lessons from the Asian financial crisis", "explore new China consumer market", "set your company's market strategy in China", "China's central bank: intelligence and orientation" and "export to China: today and tomorrow."
     Shanghai has devoted a lot of resources and energy to preparation of the convocation of the meeting, including building an advanced convention center and an international airport and training volunteers to serve at the meeting.
     Coming into being in 1930, the Fortune magazine began to appraise and select the top 500 US enterprises that have the largest operational revenue in the United States in 1955. In 1990, it began to publish a ranking of the top 500 industrial enterprises in the world. And in 1994, it expanded the scope of the top 500 ranking to include service industry.
     The ranking is based mainly on operational revenues. But it also compares assets, net income, sales volume, the number of employees, investment and dividend. The Fortune top 500 ranking has been considered as an authoritative measurement of the economic power of an enterprise and a weatherglass of a country's economic strength.
     The Fortune Global Forum has been held consequently in Singapore, Barcelona of Spain, Bangkok of Thailand and Budapest of Hungary since 1995. (Xinhua)

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