Houston Strategies

2007 Fortune 500 HQ analysis for Houston and Texas

A couple years ago, I looked at how Houston and Texas scored with the Fortune 500 headquarters. Well, the new 2007 list is out, and I thought it might be interesting to take a look again at how we're doing.

• We're still the #2 city behind NYC, with each of us gaining 2 more HQs. They moved from 43 to 45, and we moved from 20 to 22. Atlanta lost a couple from 14 to 12 (one of those was San Antonio-based SWB/AT&T buying Bell South), and Chicago picked up 1 from 10 to 11. They counted Halliburton in Houston this year, and they really should count it again in Houston next year, even if the CEO "offices" in Dubai.
  
• They don't have stats for metros, and I didn't try to add them up (who can guess which metro has all those small cities in CA?), but I don't think we would fall much from #2: behind Chicago and possibly the SF Bay Area. We only pick up 1 to 23, with Anadarko in The Woodlands, but Chicago and SF pick up a lot in their smaller suburban cities.

OK, a little bad news. I just did the count, and the greater DFW metro has 24 F500 HQs, edging us out by 1. If it makes you feel any better, we have 4 in the mega-biggie F100, while they only have 1 (Exxon in Irving, and by far the majority of their employees are in Houston).

• As a state, Texas has moved up in the world over the last two years (48->56), passing California (52->52) to become the #2 state just behind New York (54->57). It is quite possible we will pass New York in the near future, as we have 10 companies ranked between 500 and 600 ready to move up (including 4 between 501-520), while New York only has 6, and their highest one is 544.
  

Somehow a major editing error made it into their opening article, which included this sentence with some very wrong numbers:

"New York boasts the most Fortune 500 firms this year with 57 companies, while Texas and California took the No. 2 and 3 spots, with 45 and 22 headquarters respectively."

For some reason they knocked 11 off our count, but a whopping 30 off the CA count. I'm sure CA isn't happy. No idea how they let that slip through.

All in all, a great couple of years for Houston and Texas. We'll have to check the progress again in another couple of years...

Update: I thought of another interesting cut on how well Texas and Houston are doing. Texas has 11% of the F500 with only 8% of the US population (1.4x), the Houston metro has 4.6% of the F500 with only 1.8% of the US population (2.5x), and the city of Houston has 4.4% of the F500 with only 0.7% of the US population (quite the impressive 6.3x).

Labels: companies, economy, headquarters, rankings

posted by Tory Gattis @ 7:58 PM