The Asian miracle has been built on the sweat of small and midsize enterprises -- thousands of them. So choosing only 200 is a challenge. To assemble our Best Under a Billion for Asia-Pacific, we look at only listed entities under $1 billion in sales that have posted solid top- and bottom-line gains and appear to be headed for more.
With Asian factories churning out so much of the world's clothing, furniture and electronics, it's no surprise that manufacturers have a strong presence on our list. So do basic materials, the stuff that goes into manufactured goods -- and into building more factories, housing and office towers. But there is still room for the unusual and the clever.
Slot machines that speak Chinese? Astro of Taiwan makes these and other gaming machines for hot hands in Russia, Japan and Australia. Singapore snackmaker Want Want Holdings has lived up to its name by selling rice crackers and gummy sweets wherever Chinese is spoken.
Tong Ren Tang's Chinese medicine shops have been concocting remedies out of cicada skins and jujubes since 1669 and now hope to gain from worldwide interest in traditional remedies.
One place that stands out this year is Taiwan, a tiny island that supplied 31 names -- more than any other country on the list. Even more surprising, most of these companies (such as Aten International) make switches that run other people's networks or LEDs (such as Everlight Electronics) that light up other companies' gadgets.
How can these humble component makers stay so profitable when the prices of their customers' TVs, DVD players and laptops are falling every year?
Being really good and really small is something that entrepreneurs on the island have turned into an art form. Jack Huang, who runs U.S. law firm Jones Day's greater China practice out of Taiwan, works with some of these entrepreneurs.
The successful ones 'picked their battles well' by targeting a niche so small and insignificant that bigger companies wouldn't be tempted to take it on but vital enough to a finished product that they can keep some loyalty with their customers: big consumer electronics companies such as Sony, Matsushita or Dell.
They make parts that cost pennies apiece -- a small fraction of the cost of a finished good -- and they do it well. This matters, explains Huang, "because the cost of a recall could be $5 for every item returned plus the damage to a company's reputation."
Then they stay one step ahead of their customers by investing in their own research to come up with a better chip design or a quieter fan with functions that copycats would have a hard time matching quickly. That makes it less tempting for anyone back in Tokyo or Silicon Valley to cut half a penny by finding an alternative partsmaker.
Not every company in Asia is feeding the region's export machine. In fact, most of the mainland Chinese companies on our list are selling to China's fabled 1.2 billion consumers and many in Japan and India to their domestic markets.
Pantaloon, a Mumbai retailer, sells everything from cell phones to saris. Riso Kyoiku in Japan keeps the competitive spirit alive with its neighborhood cram schools. Even amid globalization, expect to see more local favorites in years ahead.
