The Happy Companies and Businessmen of the Year Selected by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal

This was the year that sale, earning, and stock price were dropped because of slump. This was the year that company images were also damaged because of continued accounting corruption scandal. However, there is a company that will remember this year as `a happy year.`

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal introduced respectively`the 12 businessmen who were happy in 2002` and `the 5 IT companies that seated on the money pile` on the 29th and 27th.

▽Businessmen of the year=Although the airline business had a general slump, the founder of the low price airline company Jet Blue, CEO David Neelmann drew attention with prestige services like putting satellite TV`s in every seat. His share of 8% of the Jet Blue is worth around 137 million dollars. The CEO of the RCA Music Group Clive Davis was kicked out from Bertelsmann in 2000 but gloriously came back as the CEO of the Bertelsmann interrelated RCA. The CEO of the Electronic Arts, Lawrence Probst secured the copyright of hit movies like `Harry Potter` and `the Lord of the Ring` to make games, so he marked double sales than last year.

After investments companies submitted reports in favor of particular companies, the CEO of Smith Bunny, Sally Chrocek and the New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer became stars. It was known that the CEO Chrocek received 11-dollars worth of stock options while moving to Smith Bunny as a general CEO of company analysis.

The CEO of Dell Computer Michael Dell, who recorded 10~15% growth in last 9 months, the CEO of Hewlett Packard Carly Fiorina, who started a melancholy year because of disagreement with founding family about merging with Compaq Computer, but raised the stock price by 54% since the end of July, and the CEO of Amazon.Com Jeff Bezos, who revitalized the company despite of analysts prediction that it would collapse soon, are included in the Businessmen of the Year.

The President of the Capital Research & Management, James F. Rothenberg, put the `American Fund` to the 2nd place in the cannon of new assets. The CEO of the USA Interactive sold the cable broadcasting division of the USA a year ago and concentrated on electronic trade, so he is making more profit than Amazon.Com or Ebay.

▽IT companies that seated on the money pile=The cash and floating assets that Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, Sysco Systems, and Intel has secured so far are 87 billion dollars. They were 77 dollars a year ago. They are, unlike other companies that suffer from lack of liquidity and debts, accelerating the investment for expanding the market. Intel plans to invest 12 billion dollars to a new factory, and Sysco also plans to invest 21 billion dollars to a new business.

The factors for securing cash liquidity for those companies are as follow: MS had a big jump in sales and profit of the new window operating systems; Sysco had effective restructuring; Dell increased the market share through aggressive price policy based on cutting down the expenses; and Oracle had secured source of income to manage business software that it created for the existing customers.

Seung-Jin Kim sarafina@donga.com