(FORTUNE Magazine) – Our bit for hands across the sea: The top ten industrial companies in this year's FORTUNE 500 are so gargantuan that News/Trends is assigning each a sister country, one whose gross national product for 1990 (the most recent figures available) closely matches the corporation's 1991 revenues. As it happens, eight of the ten already have a presence in their sister state. In Uusikaupunki, Finland, General Motors -- still No. 1 -- is making Opel Calibras in a joint venture with Swedish automaker Saab. No. 2 Exxon is in Indonesia, drilling for oil in a joint venture with Mobil (No. 6). GE (No. 5) sells jet engines to Greece's Olympic Airways. Du Pont (No. 8) produces herbicides and fungicides in Barranquilla, Colombia. Chevron (No. 10) sells fuel oil produced by a local refinery in Singapore. That island state, by the way, is gaining on Chevron. The company's 1991 sales dropped 6.3% while Singapore's 1990 GNP rose 20.6%. Indeed, the countries have been doing better overall than the 500: GNPs rose a total 4.2% over the comparable 12-month periods, but the ten companies' sales fell 3.1%. Members of the top ten are tiptoeing warily into their sister countries in Eastern Europe. IBM (No. 4) opened a subsidiary in Poland in October 1991. Texaco (No. 9) sells some lubricants in Romania. Although Philip Morris (No. 7) has no official presence in Czechoslovakia, Marlboros go for $1.25 a pack, about half the U.S. price. The exceptions among the top ten to all this sibling activity are Ford Motor (No. 3), which divested its South African holdings in 1988, and Mobil, which is steering clear of strife-torn Algeria.

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