Most Profitable Companies in the World

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Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is the most profitable company in the world in the current ranking. Nvidia and Saudi Aramco follow it. The order comes from each company’s earnings over the trailing twelve months (TTM). It does not use revenue, stock market value or share price. That choice explains why a chipmaker sits above Apple, why Walmart appears far down the list despite its enormous sales, and why a $1 share can belong to one of the 15 most profitable businesses on the planet.

How the Ranking Is Ordered

Trailing twelve-month earnings

TTM figures add up a company’s four most recently reported quarters. This keeps every company on a full-year basis even though fiscal years end at different times. Microsoft’s fiscal year closes in June and Apple’s in September, while many banks and oil companies use the calendar year. Without TTM, a company that just finished a strong fiscal year could be compared against one whose latest annual report is nearly twelve months old.

TTM figures still lag. They only move when a company publishes a new quarter, so the ranking reflects the past year rather than current conditions. A sharp drop in oil prices or memory chip prices this month will not appear until the affected quarters are reported. Companies also report on different schedules, which means two neighbors in the table may have last updated weeks apart.

What “earnings” measures, and what it leaves out

Earnings is the bottom of the income statement: what remains after a company covers the cost of producing its goods, its operating expenses such as research, marketing and salaries, interest on its debt, and (for net income) taxes. It measures how much a company actually kept.

Other profit measures answer different questions:

• Revenue is total sales before any costs. A retailer can sell more than almost anyone and still keep a few cents per dollar.
• Gross profit subtracts only the direct cost of producing what was sold. A software company can show a very high gross profit and then spend much of it on research, sales and stock-based pay.
• Operating income subtracts operating expenses as well but stops before interest and taxes. It describes how profitable the core business is.
• EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) strips out financing choices and the cost of past capital spending, so it overstates the cash available to shareholders in capital-intensive industries such as oil, chips and telecom.

Data providers do not all define “earnings” the same way. Some use pre-tax income and others use net income. A company’s position can therefore differ slightly between this table and another ranking even when both use TTM data. Within this table, every company is measured the same way, so the order itself is consistent.

Currency conversion

Aramco reports in Saudi riyals, the Chinese banks in yuan, Samsung and SK Hynix in Korean won, and Toyota in yen. Their earnings are converted to U.S. dollars for the table. If the won weakens against the dollar, SK Hynix’s earnings in dollar terms shrink even though its profit in won is unchanged. For companies near each other in the ranking, a currency move alone can change the order.

Why share price is not a measure of profit

Share price says nothing about the size of a company or its profits. It equals market value divided by the number of shares outstanding. Aramco has billions of shares in issue, so a price of a few dollars per share is consistent with one of the largest profit pools in the world. ICBC, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China and Bank of China are all quoted at around $1 to $2 a share, yet each sits in the top 20 for earnings.

Share classes complicate the price column further. Berkshire Hathaway’s price is for its Class B shares (BRK-B). One Class A share is convertible into 1,500 Class B shares, and the Class A stock carries one of the highest per-share prices of any listed company. Alphabet appears under GOOG, its Class C shares, which carry no voting rights. It also has a voting Class A line, GOOGL. Neither price changes the company’s earnings.

What the Top of the Table Shows

Over the trailing twelve months, Alphabet earned $290.7 billion, Nvidia $230.2 billion and Saudi Aramco $203.2 billion. The gap between first and third is wider than the entire annual earnings of Meta Platforms, which ranks 12th at $81.6 billion.

Country composition is heavily skewed. Of the top 25, 12 are U.S. companies and 5 are Chinese, four of them state-controlled banks and one an oil producer. South Korea has 2, and Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Norway, Japan and France have 1 each.

Which Industries Make the Most Money

The top 25 fall into a small number of business types. Grouping them and adding their TTM earnings gives an approximate answer to which industry earns the most among the world’s largest profit makers. The groupings are editorial: Samsung, for example, sells phones and displays as well as chips.

The remaining two places go to Berkshire Hathaway, a conglomerate, and Toyota, the only automaker in the top 25.

These sums cover only the top 25 and are not industry totals. Places 26 to 50 add more oil producers (Petrobras, Chevron, CNOOC), more banks (HSBC, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Mitsubishi UFJ, Santander, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas), two drugmakers (Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk), plus a retailer, a payments network, telecom operators, a miner, an insurer and several holding companies.

The groups make money in different ways:

• Technology platforms combine very high margins with huge user bases. Network effects make search, social networks, app stores and cloud services hard to displace once they reach scale. The same scale draws regulators. A U.S. federal court ruled in August 2024 that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in search, and Apple’s App Store practices have faced antitrust action in the U.S. and the EU.
• Semiconductor companies in this table profit from demand for chips used in artificial intelligence data centers. Nvidia designs the accelerators, TSMC manufactures chips for others, Broadcom sells custom and networking chips, and SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron make memory.
• Oil and gas producers earn according to the gap between the price of crude and their cost of extracting it. Their profits track commodity prices closely.
• Banks earn mainly from the spread between what they pay depositors and what they charge borrowers, plus fees. Their position in the table reflects sheer balance sheet size more than high margins.

Entries That Need Context Before Comparison

Berkshire Hathaway: reported profit includes portfolio swings

Berkshire Hathaway owns operating businesses outright, including GEICO, BNSF Railway, Berkshire Hathaway Energy and Duracell. It also holds large stakes in public companies such as Apple, American Express and Coca-Cola. Under U.S. accounting rules in force since 2018, changes in the market value of those stock holdings run through net income even when Berkshire sells nothing. In a strong market year, its reported earnings can jump. In a weak one, they can turn sharply lower without any change in how its railroad or insurers performed. Berkshire itself directs shareholders to its operating earnings, which exclude these investment gains and losses. Its 10th place therefore depends partly on stock market moves during the trailing period, which is not true of an oil producer or a bank in the same way.

Memory chipmakers: profits that swing with prices

Three of the top ten (SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron) make memory chips. DRAM and NAND memory are sold close to commodity terms, so prices and profits swing with the balance between supply and demand. The industry has a long history of years with very strong profits followed by years of losses when supply overshoots. Their current positions reflect the past twelve months of pricing, including demand for high-bandwidth memory used alongside AI accelerators, so each TTM figure captures one point in that cycle.

Samsung is also a broad electronics group. Its earnings include smartphones, televisions and display panels alongside memory, so its figure is not directly comparable with a pure memory maker.

Saudi Aramco: state ownership and the oil price

The Saudi government took full ownership of Aramco in 1980 and listed a small slice of shares on the Saudi exchange in 2019. The state still holds the large majority directly and through the Public Investment Fund. Aramco’s advantage is cost: Saudi Arabia’s large, easily accessible reserves let it produce crude far more cheaply than most rivals. Its profits still follow the oil price. In 2022, when energy prices surged, Aramco reported net income of $161.1 billion, at the time the largest annual profit on record for a listed company. The other oil producers in the top 25 face the same price exposure at higher production costs.

China’s Big Four banks: scale and state control

ICBC, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China and Bank of China are the country’s “Big Four” state-controlled lenders, and all four appear in the top 20. Their earnings come from vast deposit and loan books that financed decades of infrastructure and property development. That role also exposes them to China’s property downturn and to government policy on lending rates and support for troubled borrowers. Their tickers point to different exchanges: ICBC is quoted in Hong Kong (1398.HK), the other three in Shanghai (.SS). U.S. investors usually reach such companies through Hong Kong listings or, where available, American depositary receipts.

Alphabet: the leader’s concentration

Alphabet’s lead rests on advertising across Google Search and YouTube, supported by its growing cloud business. That concentration in advertising and the antitrust ruling against its search business are the two factors most likely to affect how long it keeps first place. Its earnings can also include gains or losses on investments in private companies, which affect net income without coming from its operations.

Most Profitable vs. Largest vs. Highest Revenue

“Largest company” can mean three different things, and each produces a different list.

By profit, Alphabet ranks first.

By revenue, retailers and energy companies dominate because they process enormous volumes at thin margins. Walmart has led global revenue rankings in most years, yet it sits 30th here. Its sales are huge, but it keeps a small share of each dollar. No company has yet reached $1 trillion in annual revenue.

By market capitalization, the order reflects what investors will pay for future earnings, not current ones. A company growing fast can be worth far more than a more profitable but slower-growing one.

Net worth, which for a company usually means shareholders’ equity, is a fourth measure often mixed up with the others. Banks and holding companies such as Berkshire Hathaway tend to have very large equity relative to their earnings, while asset-light software companies can be extremely profitable with comparatively small book value.

Reading the Ranking as an Investor

A place near the top says a company earned a great deal over the past year. It says nothing about whether its stock is cheap, whether its profits will last, or how its shares will perform. Several checks turn the ranking into something useful:

1. Compare earnings with market value. The price-to-earnings ratio is market capitalization divided by earnings. Two companies with similar earnings can trade at very different multiples because investors expect different growth. A lower ratio is not automatically a bargain if earnings are near a cyclical peak.
2. Separate cyclical from steady profits. Oil producers and memory chipmakers can move dozens of places as prices change. Payment networks, large platforms and some consumer businesses tend to show smoother earnings, though none is guaranteed to stay that way.
3. Look for one-off items. Investment gains, asset sales, legal settlements and tax changes can inflate or depress a single year’s net income. Operating income or company-reported adjusted figures help show the underlying trend, provided the adjustments are understood.
4. Check concentration. Many of the most profitable U.S. companies here are also among the largest weights in the S&P 500. An index fund investor may already hold a substantial position in them without buying any directly.
5. Consider currency and listing. For foreign companies, dollar earnings depend on exchange rates, and the share actually bought (local listing, Hong Kong listing or ADR) affects trading costs, dividends and tax withholding.

Over the past few years, the top spot has changed hands between an oil producer and technology companies as oil prices and AI demand shifted.

The Bottom Line

The ranking matters most to investors who want to know which companies kept the most profit over the past year, led by Alphabet, Nvidia and Saudi Aramco. A high place says nothing about whether a stock is cheap or whether profits will last. Check price-to-earnings ratios, separate cyclical oil and memory chip profits from steadier ones, watch for one-off gains, and remember that index funds may already hold the biggest U.S. names.