Amazon.com has topped the BusinessWeek InfoTech 100 list for 2008.

Online retailer Amazon.com has come top of BusinessWeek’s annual InfoTech 100 ranking of technology’s top performing companies, for the second consecutive year.

In 2007, Amazon.com rose from No.23 to No.1, and the company retains the top spot this year, beating Apple (No.2), Nintendo (No.4), and Google (No.11).

BusinessWeek sorted through the financial results of 30,500 publicly traded companies and ranked the tech players on four criteria: shareholder return, return on equity, total revenues, and revenue growth. The companies leading the list are those with the lowest aggregate ranking.

Despite two American firms topping this year’s list, the dominance of US companies in the ranking is in decline. Just 33 companies on the list this year are US based, down from 43 in 2007. When BusinessWeek first began compiling the InfoTech 100 in 1998, 75 of the top performers were U.S. companies.

To qualify for the top 100, companies had to have revenues of at least US$300 million (£153m). Companies whose stock price has dropped more than 75%, whose sales shrank, or where other developments raised questions about future performance, were eliminated from contention. BusinessWeek also dropped some phone companies whose monopoly or near-monopoly power in their countries gives them an unfair advantage over competitors.

The 10th annual InfoTech 100 appears in BusinessWeek’s 2 June 2008 issue, with expanded content on BusinessWeek.com at www.businessweek.com/it100.