Apple, Samsung CEOs named world's best

Apple's Steve Jobs and former Samsung chief Yun Jong-Yong have been named the first and second best CEOs in the world, respectively, in a new survey by the Harvard Business Review.

Jobs has been credited with delivering a massive 3,188% return for Apple shareholders, and helping boost the company's market value by $150 billion.

And during his tenure at Samsung between 1996 and 2008, Yun “capably transformed Samsung from a maker of memory chips and me-too products into an innovator selling digital products such as leading-edge cellphones,” the report states.

The CEOs of four telecom service providers made the top 50 list - including China Mobile's Wang Jianzhou in 41^splace.

Juan Villalonga Navarro, who served as CEO of Telefonica between 1996 and 2000, was 33^rd on the list, while KPN's A J Scheepbouwer made 48^th place. Paul Chisholm, former CEO of the UK's Colt Telecom, placed 26^th.

Google's Eric Schmidt placed 9^th, behind Amazon's Jeff Bezos (7^th) and former eBay CEO Margaret Whitman (8^th).

Other current and former technology company CEOs to make the top 50 include Cisco's John Chambers (4^th), Symantec's John Thompson (19^th) and NTT Data's Tomeo Janbayashi (28^th).

The study compared the performance of CEOs from the nearly 2000 companies that have made the Standard and Poors' Global 1200 or the BRIC 40 lists since 1997. Only CEOs which had taken office between 1995 and 2007 were considered.

Performance was judged on country-adjusted shareholder return, industry-adjusted return and change in market capitalization.