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 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.

Graph and download economic data for Market Capitalization Outside of Top 10 Largest Companies to Total Market Capitalization for Brazil (DDAM02BRA156NWDB) from 1998 to 2019 about market cap, Brazil, companies, and stock market.

Investor AB, was the leading company by market capitalization in Sweden as of October 10, 2024. The Swedish investment company had a market cap of approximately 89.59 billion U.S. dollars. Atlas Copco and Spotify were the other largest companies, with a market cap of 86.55 and 75.1 billion U.S. dollars, respectively.

Graph and download economic data for Market Capitalization Outside of Top 10 Largest Companies to Total Market Capitalization for Peru (DDAM02PEA156NWDB) from 1998 to 2020 about Peru, market cap, companies, and stock market.

Graph and download economic data for Market Capitalization Outside of Top 10 Largest Companies to Total Market Capitalization for Cyprus (DDAM02CYA156NWDB) from 2004 to 2020 about Cyprus, market cap, companies, and stock market.

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.

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

Graph and download economic data for Market Capitalization Outside of Top 10 Largest Companies to Total Market Capitalization for Greece (DDAM02GRA156NWDB) from 1998 to 2020 about Greece, market cap, companies, and stock market.

As of April 10, 2025, tech giants Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet (Google), and Amazon dominated the S&P 500 index and were among only eight companies with a market capitalization exceeding *** ******** U.S. dollars in the U.S.

Analysis of ‘6,000 Largest Companies Ranked by Market Cap’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/prasertk/6000-largest-companies-ranked-by-market-cap on 13 February 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

Context

Largest Companies by Market Cap.

Acknowledgements

Data source: https://companiesmarketcap.com/ Cover image credit: https://www.pexels.com/photo/high-rise-buildings-443383/

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

Graph and download economic data for Market Capitalization Outside of Top 10 Largest Companies to Total Market Capitalization for India (DDAM02INA156NWDB) from 2001 to 2018 about market cap, companies, India, and stock market.

*** was the leading company in Germany by market capitalization as of October 11, 2024, with almost *** billion U.S. dollars. *** was established in 1972 in Germany and is the largest software company in Europe. ******* and **************** followed, each with market capitalizations of approximately ****** and ****** billion U.S. dollars, respectively.

Graph and download economic data for Market Capitalization Outside of Top 10 Largest Companies to Total Market Capitalization for Slovenia (DDAM02SIA156NWDB) from 1998 to 2014 about Slovenia, market cap, companies, and stock market.

*********** was the leading company in the United Kingdom by market capitalization as of October 11, 2024. Headquartered in Cambridge, England, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology company had a market capitalization of approximately ****** billion U.S. dollars.

Top Wealth market cap as of June 23, 2025 is $0.01B. Top Wealth market cap history and chart from 2023 to 2024. Market capitalization (or market value) is the most commonly used method of measuring the size of a publicly traded company and is calculated by multiplying the current stock price by the number of shares outstanding.

As of May 2025, Amazon was the biggest internet company worldwide with a market cap of over two trillion U.S. dollars Second-ranked Alphabet had a market capitalization of 1.88 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 1.88 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 86 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.

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.

When looking at the leading food and drink service chains by market value, as ranked by Forbes in its 2024 "Global 2000" list of the largest companies worldwide, McDonald's came out on top. The fast food chain accounted for a market value of approximately 196.3 billion U.S. dollars that year. Meanwhile, second in the ranking was Chipotle Mexican Grill, with a market value of 88.26 billion U.S. dollars.

Explore the Top 50 US Tech Companies Dataset with metrics like revenue, market cap, employee size, and more. Perfect for market research, business analysis, and AI projects.