Boston Consulting Group says Apple is most innovative company in the world. - The hi-tech sector is flying high. According to the 2014 list of the 50 most innovative companies in the world released today by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), seven of the ten most innovative companies are in the hi- tech sector. There are 12 of them in the Top 20, and 21 of them in the 50 listed. The consumer goods sector is the second most represented, with ten companies out of 50. The car sector, on the other hand, continues to decline this year, although it still had three companies in the Top 10 last year (now only two of them). In the Top 20 there are now only four of them in the Top 50 as opposed to nine of them in 2013. Apple is still the most innovative company in the world. It has remained in first place for the past ten years. It is followed by Google, which recovers second position - a position snatched from it last year by Samsung (which falls into third place). Microsoft is next in fourth place and IBM in fifth. These top five companies have developed a “real culture of innovation”, said BCG. The next to follow is the online trading giant Amazon, in sixth place, followed by car manufacturers Toyota from Japan (7th) and electronic car specialist Tesla from the USA, which has made a spectacular leap from 41st place to 8th position. Facebook is in ninth place and Sony in tenth. Three other companies leapt forward in this league table as well as Tesla - Cisco Systems, which moves from 46th place to 14th; Siemens, which shifts from 39th to 15th place, and Philips, which jumped from 49th to 29th position. At a national level, the list is largely dominated by US companies, which account for 14 of the Top 20. The other nationalities in the Top 20 are South Korea (two companies), Japan (two companies) and Germany (two companies - the only two European companies in the Top 20, Siemens in15th position and BMW in 18th. In the list as a whole, there are 25 US groups and 13 from Europe. BCG notes, however, that the companies from emerging economies have made significant progress with five companies in the Top 50, as opposed to only two last year. They are a beginning to be particularly aggressive in terms of spending on innovation, which could change the list over the next few years, explains BCG. BCG interviewed 1,500 senior managers in an effort to draw up its list, in many different companies, before basing the survey on three financial criteria - growth in profit margins, turnover and total shareholder yield. (IL)