SAIC

Okay, this is scary. That's a link to a really long article (even for Vanity Fair) on a company you probably never heard of, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

Forget Halliburton, GE, Electric Boat, National Steel and Shipbuilding, Boeing, and Bechtel. These guys have the sweet deals, and the big cojones to go after more and more.

SAIC has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other private company in America. The contracts number not in the dozens or scores or hundreds but in the thousands: SAIC currently holds some 9,000 active federal contracts in all. More than a hundred of them are worth upwards of $10 million apiece. Two of them are worth more than $1 billion. The company's annual revenues, almost all of which come from the federal government, approached $8 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, and they are continuing to climb. SAIC's goal is to reach as much as $12 billion in revenues by 2008. As for the financial yardstick that really gets Wall Street's attention—profitability—SAIC beats the S&P 500 average. Last year ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, posted a return on revenue of 11 percent. For SAIC the figure was 11.9 percent.

Yes, they beat ExxonMobil by nearly a point in a year which has been called BigOil's best year ever.