Xinfu claims the list is the first of its kind to combine ‘hard’ metrics on performance with ‘soft’ metrics on leadership qualities.
It considered the CEOs of the largest 300 listed companies by market capitalisation, discounting 32 leaders who had been in the role for less than a year.
The top 10 CEOs are long serving, with an average tenure of 12.5 years – more than twice the tenure of a FTSE 100 CEO.
About 90% of the Top 100 are older than 50, and only 3% are female, highlighting more extreme gender inequality at the highest echelons of business than was on display at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week.
The Top 10 table doesn’t include older established brands. Xinfu said the new generation of CEOs are “much longer-term, commercially aggressive, focused on doing the right thing and are not overly swayed by sentiment and short term shareholder pressure”.
Half of the Top 10 CEOs run technology firms: Tencent, Baidu, Samsung, Oracle and Google, and nearly half are from North America. Europe is the next most dominant region on the list, while BRIC countries only have 16 CEOs in the Top 100.
Xinfu's Top 10 CEOs
1. Jeff Bezos, Amazon
2. Pony Ma, Tencent China
3. Jeffrey Boyd, Priceline
4. Robin Li, Baidu
5. Oh-Hyun Kwon, Samsung
6. J Michael Pearson, Valeant Pharmaceuticals
7. Laurence Fink, BlackRock
8. Larry Ellison, Oracle
9. Larry Paige, Google
10. Carlos Brito, Anheuser-Busch InBev
