The economic weekly Business Week has published its annual world ranking of the top performing companies in 2004, in order of market value. This classification reveals that: 1) there have been few changes in the leader group: GE, MICROSOFT and EXXON MOBIL remain the three largest companies. GE outstrips the next two, which are very close to each other; 3) The highest-ranked European company is BP, which climbs two places compared to 2003; 4) the second and last European company in the "Top 10"...