THE Ghana Investment Promotion Centre (GIPC) has reviewed the method of ranking to the membership of Ghana Club 100 (GC100) to give more meaning and relevance to the club.

The new criteria will now be based on profitability, turnover, growth rate in turnover and net assets.

Further, entrants to GC100 will be strictly based on limited companies and companies with government interest, government shares, shared net be above 50 per cent.

All entrants must have cumulative net profits that are positive for the most recent three years period. According to GIPC, companies will be ranked on each of the four indicators and all four factors will be equally weighted and that the final rank in the GC100 will be the weighted average rank obtained after weighing all the four factors.

This, the centre believes, will give full recognition for successful enterprise building and make it possible for small but well-managed firms to be members of this prestigious club.

The GC100 programme was launched by the centre in 1998 to showcase the strengths and achievements of Ghanaian Corporate Businesses and in so doing to help attract buyers to source Ghanaian goods and services as well as attract additional foreign capital, new technologies and other relevant interests.

Also the GC 100 programme was expected to develop an open information culture within the corporate sector, develop a uniform criteria for evaluating corporate performance, establish an annual current analysis of Ghana?s corporate sector and to provide incentives for improved corporate performance.

It is also to provide both local and external exposure to the selected enterprises, use the selected enterprises as growth points for private sector development and to target government support and intervention to enhance the international competitiveness of Ghanaian enterprises and provide information and strategy for private sector development.

Though the GC 100 programme has been largely successful it has also thrown up a few problems and challenges, prominent among these has been the realisation that some loss making companies have featured rather prominently in the previous rankings.

There also seems to be an overwhelming preponderance of government owned companies in the top echelons of the rankings.

Some analysts have argued that these companies are not strictly run on private sector lines and principles and this does not give true meanings to the real performance of the companies.

To address these problems, and to ensure that the GC 100 programme becomes even more relevant and representative of corporate excellence in the country, the centre subjected the programme to a lot of critical analysis and came out with the new structure and criteria.