With a market capitalization of 3.12 trillion U.S. dollars as of May 2024, Microsoft was the world’s largest company that year. Rounding out the top five were some of the world’s most recognizable brands: Apple, NVIDIA, Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Amazon. Saudi Aramco led the ranking of the world's most profitable companies in 2023, with a pre-tax income of nearly 250 billion U.S. dollars. How are market value and market capitalization determined? Market value and market capitalization are two terms frequently used – and confused - when discussing the profitability and viability of companies. Strictly speaking, market capitalization (or market cap) is the worth of a company based on the total value of all their shares; an important metric when determining the comparative value of companies for trading opportunities. Accordingly, many stock exchanges such as the New York or London Stock Exchange release market capitalization data on their listed companies. On the other hand, market value technically refers to what a company is worth in a much broader context. It is determined by multiple factors, including profitability, corporate debt, and the market environment as a whole. In this sense it aims to estimate the overall value of a company, with share price only being one element. Market value is therefore useful for determining whether a company’s shares are over- or undervalued, and in arriving at a price if the company is to be sold. Such valuations are generally made on a case-by-case basis though, and not regularly reported. For this reason, market capitalization is often reported as market value. What are the top companies in the world? The answer to this question depends on the metric used. Although the largest company by market capitalization, Microsoft's global revenue did not manage to crack the top 20 companies. Rather, American multinational retailer Walmart was ranked as the largest company in the world by revenue. Walmart also had the highest number of employees in the world.

In 1989, the Industrial Bank of Japan had a market capitalization of approximately 104.29 billion U.S dollars, making it the largest company in the world at the time. Six of the ten largest companies worldwide in 1989 were based in Japan while the remaining four were American, highlighting the economic dominance of these two countries in the late 1980s.

In 2009, Ecxxon Mobil Corp had a market capitalization of approximately 327.71 billion U.S dollars, making it the largest company in the world at the time. Five of the ten largest companies worldwide in 2009 were based in the United States, with three from Europe and two from China.

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Graph and download economic data for Market Capitalization Outside of Top 10 Largest Companies to Total Market Capitalization for Japan (DDAM02JPA156NWDB) from 1998 to 2020 about market cap, companies, stock market, and Japan.

Graph and download economic data for Market Capitalization Outside of Top 10 Largest Companies to Total Market Capitalization for Spain (DDAM02ESA156NWDB) from 1998 to 2020 about market cap, Spain, companies, and stock market.

As of May 23, 2025, Microsoft was the leading tech company by market capitalization globally at 3.38 trillion U.S. dollars. Nvidia ranked second at 3.24 trillion U.S. dollars. Tech company stocks were impacted through 2025 as a result of various global tariff threats by the United States government. Apple among the leaders Since its foundation in a Californian garage in 1976, Apple has expanded massively, becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world. The company started its origins in the PC industry with the Macintosh, but soon entered other segments of the consumer electronics market. Today, the iPhone is the most popular Apple product, although Mac, iPad, wearables, and services also contribute to its high revenues. Aiming at innovation, Apple invests every year in research and development, spanning a wide array of technologies from AI through to extended reality. Nvidia's immense growth With a focus that began with origins in gaming, Nvidia's business strategy has been transformed by demand from data centers that sit at the heart of the AI boom. The company's chips have been favored to support in the training and running of a range of large language models, most notably in the development of OpenAI's ChatGPT.

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Market capitalization, commonly called market cap, is the market value of a publicly traded company's outstanding shares. Market capitalization is equal to the share price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. Wikipedia

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In 2024, Netflix was the second-largest media company ranked by market capitalization - at 290.8 billion U.S. dollars. At the same time, Apple outperformed the top media companies by a large margin, with a market cap of over 3.2 trillion U.S. dollars that year. Disney closed the top three with 181 billion U.S. dollars in market capitalization.

As of May 2025, Amazon was the biggest internet company worldwide with a market cap of over ************ U.S. dollars Second-ranked Alphabet had a market capitalization of **** trillion U.S. dollars. The end of the 1990s in the United States saw the rise of a great number of internet companies, also called online companies or a variety of the name “dot com,” where the “.com” domain is derived from the word commercial. At the time, such startups were merely riding the wave of early internet business, but had little capital and perhaps one good idea. Few companies have survived the burst of the dot com bubble and even fewer have managed to become internationally successful. A few notable exceptions are American companies such as Google (founded in 1998), Amazon (founded in 1994) or eBay Inc. (founded in 1995), and the Chinese online giant Alibaba (founded in 1998), which have come to be some of the largest internet companies in the world. One of the largest internet companies worldwide is currently Alphabet, the parent company of Google, with a market capitalization of **** trillion U.S. dollars as of May 2025. Having started as a PhD project at Stanford University, the Google project slowly gained traction and is now the number one search engine in the world, with a market share of ** percent on the search engine market. Due to a number of high profile acquisitions, Google has expanded its portfolio beyond search, to include the video content sharing site YouTube, the digital app platform Google Play Store, the webmail service Gmail and the web browser Google Chrome, to only name a few. In October 2015, Google reorganized itself into a newly created parent company, the multinational conglomerate Alphabet Inc. The biggest internet companies in terms of their workforce are currently Amazon, Alphabet and Meta.

The value of global domestic equity market increased from 65.04 trillion U.S. dollars in 2013 to 124.63 trillion U.S. dollars in 2023. The United States was by far the leading country with the largest share of total world stocks as of 2024. Global market capitalization in different regions The market capitalization of domestic companies listed varied across different regions of the world. As of Decmber 2024, the Americas region had the largest domestic equity market, totaling 62 trillion U.S. dollars. This region is home to the NYSE and Nasdaq, which are the two largest stock exchange operators in the world. The market capitalization of these two exchanges alone exceeded 60 billion U.S. dollars as of January 2025, larger than the total market capitalization in the Asia-Pacific, and in the EMEA regions in the same period. Largest Stock Exchanges in Latin America As of December 2024, the B3 (Brasil Bolsa Balcao) was the biggest stock exchange in Latin America in terms of market capitalization and the second-largest in terms of number of listed companies. Following the B3 were the Mexican Stock Exchange and the Santiago Stock Exchange in Chile. The most valuable company in Latin America is listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange: Fomento Económico Mexicano, a multinational beverage and retail company headquartered in Monterrey, had market cap of 177 billion U.S. dollars as of March 2025.

This horizontal bar chart displays market cap ($) by CEO using the aggregation sum. The data is filtered where the company is Global Ports Holding. The data is about companies.

The NYSE U.S. 100 Index tracks the largest U.S. companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange. This statistic shows the leading 20 companies on the NYSE U.S. 100 Index by market capitalization. As of January 28, 2024 the multinational conglomerate company Berkshire Hathaway ranked as the first, with a market capitalization of over 900 billion euros. This was followed by Eli Lilly and JP Morgan Chase, with market capitalizations amounting to 695 billion and 678 billion euros respectively. NYSE U.S. 100 Index vs. Nasdaq 100 Index The New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq are the largest two stock exchanges in the world, but they differ in the kinds of companies they list. The NYSE is known to list stable and long-lasting firms, commonly referred to as “blue-chip” companies. In contrast, the Nasdaq is renowned for listing the world’s biggest companies, mainly from the tech industry. Similar to the NYSE U.S. 100 Index, the Nasdaq 100 Index tracks the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange, including both U.S. and non-U.S. companies. The leader of the NYSE U.S. 100 index: Berkshire Hathaway Berkshire Hathaway, the leader of the NYSE U.S. 100 Index, was also among the world's largest companies by revenue in 2023. The company is a multinational conglomerate and holding company with insurance as its core business and interests in other sectors such as railroad, utilities and energy, finance. In fact, Berkshire was the world's biggest insurance company by revenue in 2023. As a holding company, it has significant stakes in some of the world’s largest companies, including Apple, Bank of America and Coca-Cola. With its diverse background in various businesses and industries, Berkshire Hathaway had a total revenue of 365 billion U.S. dollars in 2023.

In recent years, cybersecurity has become a topic of crucial importance. This trend has brought with it the emergence of multibillion-dollar companies such as Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Fortinet. In 2025, California-based Palo Alto was the most valuable company in the cybersecurity sector, with a market capitalization exceeding 100 billion U.S. dollars. Among the 10 leading cybersecurity firms in terms of market capitalization, eight were based in the United States. A booming market Information Technology (IT) security, more commonly known as cybersecurity, refers to the practice of managing access to information, whether that is securing information from unauthorized access or verifying the identity of those who claim to have the authority to access information. In 2024, the cybersecurity products and services market was forecast to be worth around 210 billion U.S. dollars, with most of the global spending concentrated on security services - a segment comprising consulting, hardware support, and implementation, among other services. Outsourcing security services Companies worldwide continue to migrate their data to the cloud. While this allows them to increase their business capacity and reduce costs, it also leaves them exposed to innumerable risks. Hence, the Security as a Service (SECaaS) market was estimated at 20 billion U.S. dollars in 2023 and was forecast to be four times larger by 2032. This business model is based on a service provider that incorporates their security services into business infrastructure based on a subscription that individuals or corporations can purchase without requiring additional on-premises hardware.

As of February 2025, the Irish-headquartered industrial gases and chemicals company Linde reached a market capitalization of nearly 220 billion U.S. dollars, which made it the world's leading chemical company based on market cap. Based on revenue, however, BASF was the top chemical company worldwide.