The Asiamoney Best Managed Companies survey has been running since 1991. Its purpose is to identify those stocks in Asia that are best thought of by the international investment community on account of the quality of that company’s management.

Their consistent approach— asking fund managers to judge companies on the basis of their ability to pinpoint and execute corporate strategy and explain that strategy to investors — has allowed the companies themselves and the investing community to gauge corporate performance over the short term and the longer term.

In this article, they reveal which companies have performed best over the life of the polls to date. To calculate the individual rankings, we gave five points to each company that topped a poll each time it did so. We gave four points to second-placed companies and so on. We then added up the points scored.

Singapore Airlines, for example, has scored 30 points — the equivalent of six first places. That is an impressive performance given that the survey has only been run seven times (it was suspended in 1994 for reasons that nobody can now remember). The individual country results are reported in the following pages.

They could not, though, resist the opportunity to then pull that data together and create a top 10 table. Sadly, while this was fun to do, the table is a statistician’s nightmare and of little practical use.

The first problem in trying to compare the performance of the companies across countries is that some companies have had less opportunity to run up a score than others.

Only Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines have been ever present in the poil. Korea, Australia and Taiwan have only missed a single year, but China and New Zealand are relatively late entries.