Fortune magazine published its latest version of its signature ranking of the nation's biggest publicly-owned companies, the Fortune 500, this week. With it, the Minnesota business community comes to the moment of the year when measure is taken of the thing we so like to say to non-Minnesotans: how many Fortune 500 companies we have.

The number is now 17.

Actually, Fortune produces a list of the nation's 1,000 biggest companies and, if you count all the way through it, there are 25 Minnesota-based companies on that.

The list starts, as our Star Tribune 100 does, with UnitedHealth Group, which dwarfed other stock-traded Minnesota companies last year with $130 billion in revenue. Cargill, the closely held agribusiness firm, was likely larger, though a direct comparison is difficult because the two firms have different financial years. Cargill had revenue of about $135 billion in its fiscal year ended May 31, 2014. It will soon publish results for its latest fiscal year, which just ended last month. Because it's not publicly-held, Cargill doesn't make the list of either Fortune or the Star Tribune.

UnitedHealth, meanwhile, is perched to surge past Cargill as it moves forward on the purchase of Catamaran, a pharmacy benefits manager with about $20 billion in annual revenue. Today, UnitedHealth's stock was pushed upward by news that it is considering an even bigger acquisition of rival insurer Aetna, which would push its annual revenue past $200 billion, past even Apple.

Minnesota has been seeing a small, but steady, decline in the number of publicly-traded companies based in the state. That's due chiefly to companies making the decision to go private or sell themselves to others that are out of state.

Fortune's new list excludes Medtronic, which, with the January closing of its purchase of Covidien, moved its legal headquarters to Ireland. Noted business journalist Allan Sloan, formerly of Fortune, praised that move in a blog post today.

Our latest Star Tribune list still had Medtronic on it and we've kept Pentair, another local company that moved its legal headquarters overseas in 2012, on our list, too. Our feeling is that the chief executives of these companies live and work here still, as do thousands of employees for both firms. Operationally, they're still essentially run from Minnesota. Some people will call us homers for our decision. We can live with it.