That doesn’t mean that all state-controlled companies are mismanaged or manipulated. On the contrary, many are major revenue and job producers. As The Economist noted in a special report on emerging-market multinationals, the world’s ten biggest oil-and-gas corporations, measured by reserves, are all state-owned, and state-backed companies account for 80 percent of the value of China’s stock market and 62 percent of Russia’s.

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Business Times of India acknowledged the problems with SOEs, but chose to focus on some that performed extremely well, such as Indian Oil, Steel Authority of India Ltd. and State Bank of India, among others.

The Business Times focused on Kolkata-based Hindustan Copper, which once had illustrated many of the problems that typically plague SOEs: too many employees, poor economies of scale, inability to adjust to a declining market. But a voluntary retirement policy helped cut the workforce from 26,000 to 6,000, and the company stream¬lined its production methods and paid down its debt, becoming one of the Business Times’ success stories.

Read the story at: http://bit.ly/IlSYLF