Today, American retail giants are the largest companies in the world in terms of revenue due to their international reach and the strength of the American consumer. Beyond the United States, many of the world’s largest companies are active in the energy sector. Heavyweights like Saudi Aramco and China National Petroleum are predominantly state-owned enterprises with large-scale global operations.
American companies dominate the Top 10
At the top of the overall ranking is Walmart, the largest retailer and private employer in America. Walmart generates nearly 74 million USD in revenue per hour with an average of 255 million weekly store visits from its global clientele. The United States accounts for 68 % of total sales, with domestic revenue increasing by 36 % since 2019.
Amazon is in second place with a revenue of 574.8 billion USD. Over the past five years, Amazon’s revenue has more than doubled, thanks to cloud computing services, Amazon Prime, and advertising revenue. **In 2025, Amazon plans to sell vehicles on its online marketplace in the United States**, further expanding its product range.
In third place is State Grid, the immense Chinese state-owned utility company. Last year, the company bought two of Chile’s largest electricity distributors and controls more than 50% of the country’s energy distribution. Additionally, State Grid is the world’s largest buyer of copper, given the metal’s vital role in electricity grid infrastructure.
Chinese Oil Companies Stand Out
Like State Grid, state-owned companies Sinopec and China National Petroleum are among the top companies in terms of revenue generated by their significant oil production. In 2023, Chinese oil companies imported a record volume of discounted Russian crude oil, making it the country’s top supplier last year. Today, Sinopec is the world’s largest oil refiner by capacity, with 5.2 million barrels per day, surpassing Exxon Mobil’s 4.5 million barrels per day.
Market Capitalization Leaders Evolve Over Time
Today, most of the top 10 companies by market capitalization are technology companies. Ten years ago, many of the most valued companies were traditional industrial giants like Exxon, Chevron, General Electric, or AT&T.
This does not mean that traditional sectors have lost all their appeal. Saudi Aramco continues to rank in the top 10, and Exxon, another oil giant, remains in the top 20. Finance and healthcare are also represented. Berkshire Hathaway leads with a market capitalization of over 1 trillion USD. Meanwhile, Visa and Mastercard are in the top 20 with market capitalizations of about 500 billion USD each. Additionally, American healthcare companies UnitedHealth Group and Eli Lilly, along with Danish company Novo Nordisk, are also in the top 20.
Market Capitalization Isn’t Everything
Fortune’s annual Global 500 list ranks the world’s largest companies by revenue rather than market capitalization. Where does Apple, the world’s most capitalized company, rank on Fortune’s list ? Using the revenue measure, Apple, which entered the top 10 for the first time only a few years ago, ranks only seventh globally and, along with Amazon, is the only major American tech company in the top 10.
Meanwhile, supermarket giant Walmart occupies the top spot. When ranking companies by revenue, tech stocks do not fare as well as when ranked by market value.
Stock market investors prefer to invest in startups that generate significant buzz but minimal, if any, revenue. Precisely because they hope to discover the next Apple or Amazon and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. After all, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos always maintained that investing in future profitability through new products and services takes priority over profit forecasts.
Most Influential Companies : What’s the Best Method ?
There is no simple method for determining a company’s size, influence, and economic prospects. For this, Forbes’ annual Global 2000 list adopts a different, multidimensional approach. It ranks the world’s largest companies using a composite score obtained by equal weighting:
- Revenue
- Profits
- Assets
- Market value
Once again, different measures will yield very different results. In this ranking, financial holding company JPMorgan Chase takes the top spot, while Apple ranks only 12th and Walmart barely makes it into the top 20.
In conclusion, while it is relatively simple to distinguish a large company from a small one using economic, technical, and organizational criteria, it is much more complicated to determine which is truly the largest. Is it Apple, with its colossal market capitalization? Walmart, with its astronomical revenue and more than 10,000 stores in 19 countries? Or JPMorgan Chase, with its enormous assets and soaring profits?
In an increasingly competitive global economy, the scale and impact of startups, like many other socio-economic criteria, are to be considered… But in the end, it all depends on the observer’s perspective.
