SAS remains among top 20 companies in annual ranking

CARY, N.C. (Jan. 8, 2003) - SAS, the world’s largest privately held software company, once again holds a spot on FORTUNE magazine’s annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. SAS ranks No. 19 this year; the company has placed among the top 20 companies all six years the list has been published.

Despite the struggling economy, which hit the technology sector particularly hard in 2002, SAS continued to expand its U.S. sales force, and the company’s overall U.S. headcount increased by 7 percent last year. SAS President and CEO Dr. James Goodnight said the investment in people is essential to SAS’ business success.

"We’ve made a conscious effort to ensure we’re hiring and keeping the right talent to improve our products and better serve our customers," said Goodnight. "To attract and retain that talent, it’s essential that we maintain our high standards in regard to employee relations. Our continued presence on the FORTUNE list indicates we’re doing just that."

For the second year in a row, Edward Jones, the St. Louis-based stockbroker, tops the magazine’s annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Also repeating at second is The Container Store of Dallas, Texas. Atlanta law firm Alston & Bird (No. 3); Xilinx (No. 4); and Adobe (No. 5) round out the top five. The complete rankings and accompanying stories appear in the Jan. 20, 2003, issue of FORTUNE, and are currently available at www.fortune.com.

To select this year's list, Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz, co-founders of the Great Place to Work Institute, surveyed a random sample of employees from 269 candidate companies to get their opinions about their workplaces. A total of 40,713 employees responded to the institute’s survey. Two-thirds of a company’s score is based on how employees in the sample respond to the Great Place to Work Trust Index, a survey instrument measuring the quality of workplace culture. The remainder of the score is based on the evaluation of company responses to the institute’s Culture Audit.

About SAS
SAS is the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence. SAS solutions are used at more than 39,000 sites - including 98 of the top 100 businesses on the Fortune 500 - to develop more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers; to enable better, more accurate and informed decisions; and to drive organizations forward. SAS is the only vendor that completely integrates leading data warehousing, analytics and traditional BI applications to create intelligence from massive amounts of data. For more than 25 years, SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know^®.

Editorial contacts:
For Americas: John Dornan, (919) 677-8000
For Europe, Middle East, Africa & Asia-Pacific: Paul Andrews, 49 (6221) 416-503

Back to Recent SAS Press Releases