Philweb lands on Forbes list of high flyers for ’13

Online gaming firm Philweb Corp. has landed on Forbes Asia magazine’s roster of 200 best up-and-coming companies for 2013.

Philweb, which is the lone Philippine company on the list this year, has been on Forbes Asia’s list of top Asian companies with less than $1 billion in market capitalization for four straight years.

China/Hong Kong firms again dominated Forbes Asia’s “Best Under a Billion” (BUB) list with 63 names this year.

Including those headquartered in Taiwan, greater China has 89 representatives, suggesting that the growth of the world’s second-largest economy remained central to the BUB story, the magazine said.

If the BUB were any indication, Forbes Asia said the Japanese economy was looking better as 17 Japanese firms made it to the list compared to only four or fewer in previous years.

“Weakness in sustaining star performers in this “SME (small and medium-sized)”-sized sector was in evidence where nations failed to gain any representation or, in the case of the otherwise booming Philippines, scored only one. By contrast, Vietnam, struggling to regain recent economic-growth rates, has 10 names on the list. Meantime, slowdown-hit India, with 19 selections, fell to its lowest level since 2007,” the magazine said.

While grateful for the continued recognition by Forbes Asia, Philweb president Dennis Valdes said in his Twitter account: “I’m sad only one Philippine company is on the list this year. Forbes is missing a lot of good firms.”

In making the selection, Forbes Asia’s editors tapped databases of 15,000 stock-traded companies in Asia-Pacific with revenues between $5 million and $1 billion and narrowed the list to those that satisfied the following criteria: five-year average return on equity and pretax margin greater than 10 percent, positive sales and earnings per share growth for both the most recent fiscal one and three-year periods, debt less than 75 percent of shareholders’ equity, and a trading history of at least one year.

Only 52 of the final 200 selection remained on the list from last year but a dozen others returned to the BUB from previous lists.

Philweb operates such concepts as Pagcor’s e-Games cafes, Internet casino station operator BigGame Inc., Basketball Jackpot, NBA Ending, Basketball 38, MegaSportsWorld sports bets and Instant Premyo sa Resibo.