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America's largest retailer by sales, Walmart operates over 11,300 stores under 58 banners, selling a variety of general merchandise and grocery items. Its home market accounted for 76% of sales in fiscal 2019, with Mexico and Central America (6%), the United Kingdom (6%), and Canada (4%) its largest external markets. In the United States, around 56% of sales come from grocery, 33% from general merchandise, and 11% from health and wellness items. The company operates several e-commerce properties apart from its eponymous site, including Flipkart, Jet.com, and shoes.com (it also owns a roughly 10% stake in Chinese online retailer JD.com). Combined, e-commerce accounted for about 5% of fiscal 2019 sales.

Comcast is made up of three parts. The core cable business owns networks capable of providing television, Internet access, and phone services to roughly 58 million U.S. homes and businesses, or nearly half of the country. About half the homes in this territory subscribe to at least one Comcast service. Comcast acquired NBCUniversal from GE in 2011. NBCU owns several cable networks, including CNBC, MSNBC, and USA, the NBC broadcast network, several local NBC affiliates, Universal Studios, and several theme parks. Lastly, Comcast acquired Sky in 2018. Sky is the dominant television provider in the U.K. and has invested heavily in exclusive and proprietary content to build this position. The firm is also the largest pay television provider in Italy and has a presence in Germany and Austria.

NextEra Energy's regulated utility, Florida Power & Light, distributes power to roughly 5 million customers in Florida. Florida Power & Light contributes over 60% of the group's operating earnings. Gulf Power also operates in Florida. The renewable energy segment generates and sells power throughout the United States and Canada. Consolidated generation capacity totals over 45 gigawatts and includes natural gas, nuclear, wind, and solar assets.

American Tower owns and leases roughly 170,000 cell towers throughout the U.S., Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. It leases space on its towers to wireless service providers, which install equipment on the towers to support their wireless networks. The company has a very concentrated customer base, with most revenue in each market being generated by just the top few mobile carriers. The company operates more than 40,000 towers in the U.S., which accounted for more than half of its total revenue in 2018. Outside the U.S., American Tower's greatest presence is in India and Brazil, where it operates roughly 75,000 and 19,000 towers, respectively. American Tower operates as a real estate investment trust.

Fidelity National Information Services is the product of two significant mergers, Sungard in 2014 and the upcoming $43.6 billion acquisition of Worldpay. The company will now provide core and payment processing services to banks, as well as merchant acquiring. In addition, Fidelity provides processing software for capital markets providers, asset managers, and custodians. As of 2019, the company serves more than 20,000 institutions in over 130 countries. North America accounts for 76% of revenue; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa another 15%; while Asia accounts for 5% of total sales.

ACE acquired Chubb in the first quarter of 2016 and assumed the Chubb name. The combination makes the new Chubb one of the largest domestic property and casualty insurers, with operations in 54 countries spanning commercial and personal P&C insurance, reinsurance, and life insurance.

Crown Castle owns and leases roughly 40,000 cell towers in the United States. It also owns more than 65,000 route miles of fiber. It leases space on its towers to wireless service providers, who install equipment on the towers to support their wireless networks. The company's fiber is primarily leased by wireless service providers to set up small cell network infrastructure and by enterprises for their internal connection needs. Crown Castle's towers and fiber are predominantly located in the largest U.S. cities. The company has a very concentrated customer base, with more than 70% of its revenue coming from the big four U.S. mobile carriers. Crown Castle operates as a real estate investment trust (REIT).

Prologis was formed by the June 2011 merger of AMB Property and ProLogis Trust. The company develops, acquires, and operates approximately 786 million square feet of high-quality industrial and logistics facilities across the globe. The company is organized into four global divisions (Americas, Europe, Asia, and other Americas) and operates as a real estate investment trust.

Intercontinental Exchange is a vertically integrated operator of financial exchanges and provides ancillary data products. Though the company is probably best known for its ownership of the New York Stock Exchange, which it acquired in 2013, ICE is the operator of a large derivatives exchange as well. The company's largest commodity futures product is the ICE Brent crude futures contract. In addition to exchanges, ICE's data and listings segment offers critically important equity and fixed-income market and pricing data. The company acquired Interactive Data in 2015 to bolster its fixed-income data offerings.

Applied Materials is one of the world's largest suppliers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, providing materials engineering solutions to help make nearly every chip in the world. The firm's systems are used in every process step with the exception of lithography. Key tools include those for chemical and physical vapor deposition, etching, chemical mechanical polishing, wafer- and reticle-inspection, critical dimension measurement, and defect-inspection scanning electron microscopes.

Spun off from Baxter International in 2000, Edwards Lifesciences designs, manufactures, and markets a range of medical devices and equipment for advanced stages of heart disease. Its key products include surgical tissue heart valves, transcatheter valve technologies, surgical clips, catheters and retractors, and monitoring systems used to measure a patient's heart function during surgery. The firm derives about 55% of its total sales from outside the U.S.

American Electric Power is one of the largest regulated utilities in the United States, providing electricity generation, transmission, and distribution to more than 5 million retail customers in 11 states. About 47% of AEP's of capacity is coal, with the remainder from a mix of natural gas (27%), renewables (14%), nuclear (7%), and demand response (5%). Earnings are supported by vertically integrated utilities, transmission and distribution utilities, competitive transmission, and unregulated generation and marketing.

A leading American discount retailer, Dollar General operates over 15,000 stores in 44 states, selling branded and private-label products across a wide variety of categories. In fiscal 2018, 78% of net sales came from consumables (including paper and cleaning products, packaged and perishable food, tobacco, and health and beauty items), 12% from seasonal merchandise (such as toys, greeting cards, decorations, and gardening supplies), 6% from home products (for example, kitchen supplies, small appliances, and cookware), and 5% from basic apparel. Stores average roughly 7,400 square feet, and about 75% of Dollar General locations are in towns of 20,000 or fewer people. The firm emphasizes value, with more than 80% of its items sold at $5 or less, mostly using an everyday low price strategy.

Based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, BB&T is a regional banking company with a presence primarily in the southeastern United States. In addition to commercial and retail banking, the company operates several nonbank segments, the primary one being its insurance brokerage business.

Xcel Energy manages utilities serving 3.6 million electric customers and 2 million natural gas customers in eight states. Its utilities are Northern States Power, which serves customers in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Michigan; Public Service Company of Colorado; and Southwestern Public Service Company, which serves customers in Texas and New Mexico. It is one of the largest renewable energy providers in the U.S. with about one quarter of its energy sales coming from renewable energy.

Hershey is a leading confectionery manufacturer in the U.S. (nearly a $25 billion market), controlling around 45% of the domestic chocolate space. Beyond its namesake label, the firm's mix has expanded over the last 85 years and now consists of more than 80 brands, including Reese's, Kit Kat, Kisses, and Ice Breakers. Hershey's products are sold in about 80 countries, with just 10%-15% of total sales coming from markets outside the United States, including Brazil, China, India, and Mexico. The firm has sought inorganic opportunities to extend its reach beyond its core confection business, with deals to add Amplify Snack Brands and its Skinny Pop ready-to-eat popcorn to its mix and Pirate Brands (including the Pirate's Booty, Smart Puffs, and Original Tings brands) over the past few years.

WEC Energy Group's electric and gas utility businesses serve electric and gas customers in its Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin service territories. WEC Energy Group also owns a 60.0% stake in American Transmission Company. WEC Energy Group's business mix is approximately 56% electric generation and distribution, 29% gas distribution, and 15% electric transmission.

SBA Communications owns and leases roughly almost 30,000 cell towers throughout North America and South America. It leases space on its towers to wireless service providers, who install equipment on the towers to support their wireless networks. The company has a very concentrated customer base, with most revenue in each market being generated by just the top few mobile carriers. The company owns more than 16,000 towers in the U.S., which accounted for three fourths of the company's total revenue in 2018. Internationally, SBA's greatest presence is in Brazil, where it operates more than 8,000 towers. SBA operates as a real estate investment trust, or REIT, but does not expect to be required to pay a dividend under REIT rules until early next decade.

TransDigm manufactures products for electronic, power, fluid, and mechanical motion control onboard commercial and military aircraft and helicopters. It also supplies products used for cabin structures, lighting, laminates, pallets, and a host of other applications. In fiscal 2018, the company generated about $3.8 billion of sales, with 70% coming from commercial aerospace customers and 30% from defense customers, noting that the latter is increasing as a percentage of sales.

Eversource Energy is a diversified holding company with subsidiaries that provide regulated electric, gas and water distribution service. With the addition of NStar's Massachusetts utilities in 2012 and Aquarion in 2017, the company's utilities now serve 4 million customers in the region. Eversource exited most of its unregulated businesses in 2006.

Dollar Tree operates discount stores in the United States and Canada, including over 7,000 shops under its namesake banner and more than 8,200 Family Dollar locations. The eponymous chain features branded and private-label products at a fixed $1 price point (CAD 1.25 in Canada). About 49% of Dollar Tree stores' fiscal 2018 sales came from consumables (including food, health and beauty, and household paper and cleaning products), 47% from variety items (including toys and housewares), and 5% from seasonal and holiday merchandise. Family Dollar features branded and private-label goods at prices generally ranging from $1 to $10, with consumables constituting 76% of fiscal 2018 sales, seasonal and electronic items (including prepaid phones and toys) 9%, home products 8%, and basic apparel 6%.

Ball is the world's largest metal can manufacturer. The company remains focused on both cost reductions associated with its acquisition of Rexam, and on pivoting toward faster-growing emerging-market economies in beverage cans. Ball maintains a small presence in both the North American food can market and the U.S. defense industry through its aerospace segment.

Realty Income owns roughly 5,000 properties, most of which are freestanding, single-tenant, triple-net-leased retail properties. Its properties are located in 49 states and Puerto Rico and are leased to 250 tenants from 47 industries. Recent acquisitions have added industrial, office, manufacturing, and distribution properties, which make up roughly 18% of revenue.

Founded in 1886, American Water Works is the largest investor-owned U.S. water and wastewater utility, serving approximately 3.4 million customers in 16 states. It provides water and wastewater services to residential, commercial, and industrial customers and operates predominantly in regulated markets, which account for over 90% of earnings. Its nonregulated market-based businesses provide complementary water and wastewater services for military bases, municipalities, oil and gas exploration and production companies, and other industrial customers.

Essex Property Trust owns a portfolio of 245 apartment communities with over 59,600 units and is developing six additional properties with 1,861 units. The company focuses on owning large, high-quality properties on the West Coast in the urban and suburban submarkets of Southern California, Northern California, and Seattle.

In its nearly 130-year history, McCormick has become the leading global manufacturer, marketer, and distributor of spices, herbs, extracts, seasonings, and other flavorings. McCormick's customer base includes top quick-service restaurants, retail grocery chains, and other packaged food manufacturers, with about 45% of sales generated beyond its home turf to include 150 other countries and territories. Beyond its namesake brand, the firm's portfolio includes Old Bay, Zatarain's, Thai Kitchen, and the recently acquired Frank's RedHot and French's brand.

TAL Education Group is an education and technology enterprise in China. The company is engaged in the provision of after-school tutoring programs for primary and secondary school students in the People's Republic of China. It offers comprehensive tutoring services to K-12 students covering core academic subjects, including others, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, geography, political science, English, and Chinese, as well as, through its Mobby tutoring services, young learners tutoring services for students aged three through eight.

Synopsys was founded in December 1986 (was called Optimal Solutions until 1987) and is a market leader in electronic design automation, or EDA, software. EDA is used to automate the design and verification of integrated circuits or larger chip systems. The firm provides an end-to-end workflow of EDA products. In addition, the firm offers a broad set of design IP and leading software integrity tools that help customers develop secure, quality code. Historically, the firm's tools have been relied upon by semiconductor firms, but there has been a shift toward other non-traditional "systems" users (non-semiconductor firms interested in chip design) given the development of the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and cloud computing.

Smith & Nephew designs, manufactures, and markets orthopedic devices and wound-care solutions. Approximately three fourths of the U.K.-based firm's revenue comes from knee replacements, hip implants, nails, fixation devices, and arthroscopy tools. The remaining 25% of revenue is from the advanced wound therapy segment. Roughly half of Smith & Nephew's total revenue comes from developed European and Asian markets, 40% is from the United States, and emerging markets account for the remainder.

Vulcan Materials is the United States' largest producer of construction aggregates (crushed stone, sand, and gravel). Its largest markets include Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. In 2018, Vulcan sold 201 million tons of aggregates, 11 million tons of asphalt mix, and 3 million cubic yards of ready-mix. As of Dec. 31, 2018, the company had more than 16 billion tons of aggregates reserves.

Cincinnati Financial Corp is a property and casualty insurance company that generates income through written premiums. A select group of independent agencies actively markets the company's business, home, and automotive insurance within their communities. These agents offer the company's personal lines as well as its standard market, excess, and surplus commercial line policies in many regions in the United States. Cincinnati Financial also offers leasing and financing services. The vast majority of the company's revenue is generated through commercial lines, followed by personal lines.

Founded in 1970, Ansys is an engineering simulation software company that enables its customers to test products by simulating multiple concepts before the manufacturing or design process is complete. Ansys' software makes it easy for companies to develop products better, faster, and less expensively. Ansys serves over 40,000 customers, and its software can be found in industries such as aerospace and defense, automotive, energy, healthcare, electronics, consumer goods, and many more. Around 75% of the company's revenue is recurring.

New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc is a provider of private educational services in China. The company offers education for a lifetime, teaching skills that give students a crucial competitive advantage in the workplace and help improve their quality of life. Its wide range of educational programs, services, and products includes English and other foreign language training, overseas and domestic test preparation courses, all-subjects after-school tutoring, primary and secondary school education, educational content and software as well as online education.

CMS Energy is an energy holding company with two principal segments: Consumers Energy, and Enterprises. Consumers Energy provides regulated natural gas service to 1.8 million customers and electric service to 1.8 million customers in Michigan. Enterprises is engaged in wholesale power generation in various locations in the United States and owns EnerBank, primarily serving industrial customers.

Franco-Nevada Corp is a precious-metals-focused royalty and investment company. The company owns a diversified portfolio of precious metals and royalty streams, which is actively managed to generate the bulk of its revenue from gold, silver, and platinum. The company does not operate mines, develop projects, or conduct exploration. Franco-Nevada's short-term financial performance is linked to the price of commodities and the amount of production from its portfolio of producing assets. Its long-term performance is affected by the availability of exploration and development capital. The company holds a portfolio of assets, diversified by commodity, revenue type, and stage of a project, primarily located in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc is a real estate investment trust primarily engaged in the acquisition, development, and leasing of urban offices on science and technology campuses throughout the United States. The company redevelops offices, warehouses, and shell space for its tenants in areas close to high concentrations of specialized research institutions and businesses. The majority of Alexandria's real estate portfolio is split between the Greater Boston and San Francisco areas. The company derives nearly all of its income in the form of revenue from its tenant companies. Alexandria's largest customers in terms of revenue are public biotechnology, multinational pharmaceutical, life science product, and academic and medical research entities.

Martin Marietta Materials is one of the United States' largest producer of construction aggregates (crushed stone, sand, and gravel). In 2018, Martin Marietta sold 171 million tons of aggregates. Martin Marietta's most important markets include Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas, accounting for 85% of sales. The company also produces cement in Texas and uses its aggregates in its asphalt and ready-mixed concrete businesses. Martin's specialty product business produces magnesia-based chemical products and dolomitic lime.