A very warm welcome to the Belfast Telegraph Northern Ireland’s Top 100 Companies magazine.

Once again we bring you the definitive list of the biggest movers and shakers in the local economy over the last year. At a time when business is in the process of ridding itself of the last remnants of one of the deepest downturns many of us have ever experienced, it’s never been more important to take a close look at the cream of the crop, if only to see how they’ve weathered the storm and what they’re doing to swim against the tide.

Many in the list will be familiar to you and have been there for years; others will be less familiar but have shouldered their way into the list for the first time; and there are others that are unfamiliar to you because they have little need for publicity. And there are even some one-time stalwart names missing altogether. Whichever category they fall into, the purpose of this list is to give you an insight into them all.

We’ve ranked them by employee numbers and turnover so as to give a good reflection of how much they contribute to the local economy. We’ve used the very latest available figures but, given the nature of compiling such a large list, there may have been one or two slight changes in the interim. In any event, it offers a good insight into the current economic situation.

And while the companies in this list are important, we shouldn’t overlook the contribution that the plethora of small and medium-sized companies make to Northern Ireland. For them, the current conditions have been as, if not more, difficult to weather over the last few months.

The overall economic situation may have improved, but the pressure on all companies both large and small has surely increased tenfold with the swathing cuts to the public sector taking place right now. The private sector as a whole has been charged with taking up the slack that will be left, particularly in the job market, by the cuts but there have been doubts raised about our ability to do that.

Think again. It’s still a tough operating environment out there for many sectors but — and as news gatherers we notice it more and more — for every tale of economic woe, there now seems to be two tales of progress. Just look at the job creation announcements over the last couple of months from the likes of Schrader Electrics, First Derivatives and Randox. These and numerous others prove there’s a revival the likes of which we haven’t seen for the last couple of years.

Things are on the up. The private sector is back and it’s coming to a business near you, soon.