While the asset base of Canada’s top 50 co-ops continues to grow, revenues have stagnated.
The 1998 figures for total assets show an increase of more than eight percent compared to 1997, but revenues of the top 50 only climbed from $21.6 billion to $21.7 billion, a modest rise of 0.4 percent.
By contrast the revenues of Canada’s top 1,000 companies (ranked by Report on Business magazine) shot up nearly nine percent during the same period and assets of the top 1,000 increased nearly 12 percent.
The director of the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives said that while the comparison between the top co-ops and the top Canadian businesses is useful and interesting, there are a few caveats.
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Two-thirds of the co-ops on the top 50 list are related to agriculture and that sector has been shrinking, said Murray Fulton. And the companies on the top 1,000 list are driven more by growth than co-ops because that’s how they attract investment dollars.
The top 50 list is a yearly ranking of Canada’s non-financial co-ops produced by Agriculture Canada’s co-operatives secretariat.
Membership in the top 50 co-ops increased by 13 percent in 1998 and they hired five percent more workers, employing nearly 39,000 people.
Three of the top five spots in 1998 belong to grain companies. Sask-atchewan Wheat Pool tops the list with revenues of $4.3 billion.
Alberta Wheat Pool and Manitoba Pool Elevators (the list predates the creation of Agricore) check in at number three and number five respectively with combined revenues of $3.3 billion.
