Here Are the Dow's 10 Fastest-Growing Companies

The single largest ray of economic sunshine across the past three years has been the ability of corporate earnings to keep expanding even while sales growth slowed. That's largely been the result of productivity gains and continuing strength in international markets. However, continuing economic woes in Europe and slowing growth in emerging markets like China and Brazil are beginning to take a toll on America's powerhouse companies. Corporate profit growth grew just 6% last quarter, which is a two-year low.

As growth becomes increasingly difficult for America's top companies to find, I wanted to take a look at not only which companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (INDEX: ^DJI  ) have seen the highest levels of growth over the past five years, but also whether that growth has translated into bottom-line and share-price growth.

The 10 Dow Companies With the best 5-Year Sales Growth

Company  Name	5-Year  Annual  Revenue  Growth  Rate (%)	5-Year  Annual  Earnings  Growth  Rate (%)	%  Price  Change  (5 Years)
Merck (NYSE: MRK  )	16.4	(3.6)	(14.4)
AT&T (NYSE: T  )	15.9	10.6	(13.4)
Coca-Cola	14.2	19.2	38.0
Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT  )	9.42	12.7	(9.48)
Kraft Foods	9.06	0.174	5.5
JPMorgan Chase	8.83	5.61	(25.2)
Cisco Systems	7.74	1.35	(34.1)
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC  )	7.52	16.3	13.6
Pfizer	7.32	(1.91)	(18.0)
Hewlett-Packard	6.78	2.68	(39.1)

Source: S&P CapitalIQ. Price change is unadjusted for dividends.

A few observations are worth noting.

First off, sales growth can fool investors. Merck and AT&T have the highest sales growth of all Dow components, but that's heavily skewed by huge acquisitions. In Merck's case, it shelled out more than $50 billion for Schering-Plough while AT&T's sales growth is aided by its Cingular merger. Since the merger closed in 2007, AT&T's sales-growth rate has been an anemic 1.3% per year. In both Merck and AT&T's case, earnings growth significantly trails their overstated sales growth.

On the other hand, tech giants like Intel and Microsoft have managed to post earnings growth far in excess of revenue gains. Part of that is a lower tax rates; Microsoft's operating profit growth actually trails its sales growth. However, another part is that while both Intel and Microsoft can be acquisitive, their targets have a relatively low level of sales. Because of this, their sales growth does a good job of showing their ability to organically grow their business aside from buying that sales growth through M&A activity.

Second, even if you've picked out a company that you think could experience high sales growth in coming years, that won't guarantee a winner. Of the above list, only two stocks -- Coca-Cola and Intel --showed high sales/earnings growth and saw their share price move north in the past five years.

The best performing Dow stock of the last five years, McDonald's, saw only the 15th highest sales growth in the Dow. Its outperformance was the result of expanding its profit margins and a beaten-down P/E ratio. Microsoft saw significantly better sales growth than McDonalds with earnings growth that was only slightly lower. Yet it underperformed McDonald's by almost 140% over the time period. That's because Microsoft was trading at a premium to its peers. At today's prices, McDonald's now trades at a P/E nearly double Intel and Microsoft.

Even with McDonald's executing extremely well, it's difficult to see it being the Dow's top performer five years from today when you consider the steep premium it trades at compared with peers seeing similar growth rates.

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