Yearbooks! Directories! Heaven preserve us!

The finish line is in sight. But the home straight still looks awfully long from here.

At the very end of December, we publish Animal Pharm's first Yearbook and Directory. One of the tasks we set ourselves (oh all right, I set for us) was to identify the Top 100 companies in the animal health industry and compile a ranking.

I mean really, how hard could it be?

Hah!

It was interesting to begin with. We decided to omit the purely nutrition-based companies and tackle them separately, perhaps in next year's edition.

We opted for estimated or actual 2006 animal health revenue in US dollars as the measure.

We decided not to count Monsanto on the grounds that Posilac isn't really an animal health product as such. We can't really count Dow yet for obvious reasons.

And we made some interesting discoveries. Dechra has grown far larger than we realised. IVX, now that the various bits of Teva, Phoenix and IVAX have come together, is much bigger than we first thought. Abbott Laboratories too is bigger than we knew. (Well, probably. They're a bit cagey with their numbers.)

And they're not the only ones. The fly in the ointment with this exercise of course is that once you get past the top thirty or forty, you're into the privately owned operations. The ones that don't have to file financial reports anywhere.

But we've done our best. The results go to press next week. And then, no doubt, the firestorm will commence...

If we have under- or over-ranked your company, just get on the phone and let me know. We hope to publish an updated version, based on 2006 actuals, mid-way through 2007.