The 24th annual Forbes Global 2000 records highs in sales, profits, assets and market value. But there is one number that stands out from the rest.
The combined market value of 2,000 of the world’s largest public companies jumped 31.8% this year, adding more than $30 trillion (approximately €27.8 trillion) in shareholder value in the last twelve months.
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Combined sales reached $56 trillion (approximately €51.9 trillion), up 6%. Profits climbed 13.9% to $5.5 trillion (approximately €5.1 trillion). Assets grew 12.9% to $272 trillion (approximately €252 trillion). However, none of these figures explains what actually happened at the level of the market.
The biggest change occurred in markets related to technology. Hardware, semiconductor, and software firms now account for 209 companies on the list, up from 186 last year. Their combined market value has nearly doubled from $23.9 trillion (approximately €22.2 trillion) to $41.4 trillion (approximately €38.4 trillion). That single cohort accounts for 57% of the entire list’s market value increase from last year. The driver appears to be the market’s appetite for anything AI-related.
The market has not been fully welcomed. Some still fear the threat of a bubble. Others see a market that still has room to run its course.
Richard Attias, chairman of the non-profit Future Investment Institute, ahead of the Forbes Iconoclast Summit in New York earlier this month, said: “AI will have an impact everywhere.”
The Chip Cycle
Nvidia climbed 20 places to No. 27 and became the most valuable chip company on the list. South Korea’s SK Hynix, whose high-bandwidth memory chips are essential to AI servers, jumped 107 places to No. 48. Alphabet, one of the largest AI hyperscalers, rose five places to No. 4. CoreWeave, the AI cloud computing firm that joined the list last year, climbed 706 places to No. 1,093.
A similar trend could be seen in the hardware space. Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision, the iPhone assembler and AI server manufacturer better known as Foxconn, climbed 55 places to No. 82. SanDisk, the California flash-storage company, entered at No. 614 after ranking outside the top 2,000 last year.
The Physical Side Of The Trade
It is not only code and cloud that saw growth, however. The materials industry also gained from the harder edge of the chip cycle. Materials companies on the Global 2000 rose 67.5% in market value and grew profits by 38.6%, as investment interest rewarded producers of copper, cobalt, lithium and the chemicals feeding semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, power systems and data centres.
British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto climbed 24 places to No. 111 after landing a two-year collaboration with Amazon Web Services to supply copper made with its Nuton bioleaching technology to AWS’s US data centres. Nucor, the steel manufacturer, rose 84 places to No. 416 on the back of data centre demand for its pre-engineered, plug-and-play steel products, the racks that hold the servers.
The Banks Still Hold Their Own
Even with AI dominating this year’s headlines, the top of the ranking still belongs to those who are in charge of the balance sheets. JPMorganChase, for instance, holds onto its No. 1 spot for the fourth year in a row, with $4.9 trillion (approximately €4.5 trillion) in assets.
There are 314 banks on this year’s list, more than any other industry, holding $140.4 trillion (approximately €130 trillion) in combined assets. That is more than half of the total for all 2,000 companies.
Another 136 diversified financial firms made the cut, alongside 113 insurers.
Banks and insurers are responsible for enormous balance sheets by design, while technology firms tend to be lighter on assets and therefore receive less credit on that metric. Elevated interest rates helped, too, allowing banks, insurers and other lenders to earn higher profits on loans and fixed-income assets.
The rest of the top 10 show a little more diversity. Amazon takes second place on $742.8 billion (approximately €688 billion) in sales and a $2.8 trillion (approximately €2.6 trillion) market value. Alphabet sits at No. 4 and Microsoft ties for No. 7, both benefiting from investor interest for the firms producing the software, cloud services and AI platforms driving the current tech rally. Berkshire Hathaway, Saudi Aramco and Bank of America remain in the upper tier on the strength of their profits, assets and cash generation. Three Chinese banking giants (ICBC, China Construction Bank and Agricultural Bank of China) close out the top 10, a remnant from the era when Chinese lenders led the list
Of the 2003 top 10, only Bank of America is still on it today.
The Old Economy And The New
The Global 2000 still shows both faces of the world economy. The heavyweight banks continue to sit on the assets, the oil majors continue to produce the cash, and the retail giants continue to move the goods. The biggest change this year was the direction of investor interest. Businesses did almost the same work they did last year, but the markets repriced that same work with AI.
The winners of that repricing saw impressive growth in this year’s ranking. Chipmakers, server manufacturers, memory producers and the infrastructure firms powering AI data centres witnessed the biggest re-ratings anywhere on the list. Whether the market’s enthusiasm endures is the question the next twelve months will answer.
