Business daily Dnevnik will award the top five companies listed on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange (BSE), based on their performance in 2007, on May 22 2008.

The awards are part of the daily's initiative to rank BSE's top 100 companies, the full results of which will be published on May 26.

Unlike last year, when Dnevnik ranked the listed companies for the first time to announce five winners based on different criteria, this year the lists were merged. The five criteria were total revenue, market capitalisation, net profit, return on equity and average daily turnover of a company's shares.

“We used the same criteria, but did not break down the list by category, instead giving equal weight to every criterion to devise a single ranking,” Todor Todorov, companies and markets editor at Dnevnik, told The Sofia Echo.

“The Dnevnik 100 ranking may surprise some readers and it certainly surprised some of the market analysts whose opinions will be published in our supplement on the issue. But for many people it reflects exactly what happened on the stock market last year,” he said.

Dnevnik is published by Economedia, the majority partner in Sofia Echo Media, which publishes The Sofia Echo.