The San Francisco Chronicle released on Monday its annual Chronicle 200 list of the top 200 Bay Area companies.  The list, compiled with the help of FactSet Research Systems is pretty comprehensive, including information such as market cap, sales, and profits, among other data points.

The 2003 results that were just in, show an encouraging sign: the top 200 Bay Area companies amassed $32.7 billion worth of profits in 2003, versus a combined loss of $8.8 billion in 2002.  As a result, their market cap increased by roughly 60 percent.

Many hi-tech companies from areas such as biotechnology, computing and the Internet, were strong performers in 2003.  The criteria that the Chronicle uses to measure performance is: revenue growth, profit growth, market cap and return to investors.  The region's economic diversity is illustrated by a sample of these top 2003 performers, which include the likes of SanDisk (memory cards), Genetech (biopharmaceuticals), Juniper Networks (networking equipment), AMD (microchips) and Yahoo!, among others.