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Today we start the countdown to our list of the Top 200 businesses in Leicestershire.

As in previous years the list has been put together by a team at to show the scale and ambition of the biggest employers in Leicester and Leicestershire.

The list has taken months to pull together and over the next few days BusinessLive will be counting down to a Top 200 breakfast event at Winstanley House hotel in Leicester on Tuesday.

There the Top 20 biggest companies will be revealed prior to the last part of the list going live on our website. The list this year is sponsored by .

This list is not intended to be a comprehensive table of where the Top 200 companies are today.

Because of the time it takes to post company accounts – and the huge gaps there can be between one company making their figures public and another company doing so – DMU has used a 12 month period that covers all the businesses on our list.

In this case that means using figures for the 2019/20 financial year, which go up to the spring of 2020. DMU said that doing so allows them to put together a like-for-like table.

As a result these figures won’t take into account the impact the pandemic has had on the turnover and profits of so many of our companies.