The broadly based improvement encompassed every sector and region and easily outpaced the broader stock market indices such as the S&P 500 (+11.8%), the FTSE (+11.1%), the DAX (+15.6%), the Hang Seng (+4.5%) and the Nikkei (-3.3%). It comes on top of an 83.8% gain in the aggregate market capitalization of the industry in 2010 after a 39.5% decline from 2008. Perhaps more interesting is that the global market capitalization of the 90 stocks reached $209.5 billion, exceeding the previous record of 2007 when the aggregate value was $184.6 billion.

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