Forbes' 2025 Global 2000 List: United Kingdom - The World’s Largest Companies Ranked

The United Kingdom doesn’t have Europe’s largest GDP, a title that belongs to Germany by a wide margin, but London is still the continent’s financial center and the home of its largest stock exchange.

That helps give the U.K. the most representation of any European country on the Global 2000, Forbes’ annual ranking of the world’s largest public companies, with 68 firms based in the United Kingdom on the list. That’s 19 more than Germany and more than any nation in the world aside from the United States, China, Japan and India.

HSBC Holdings at No. 15 and Shell at No. 23 are the only two of those 68 companies that are ranked among the top 100 on the overall list. HSBC is Europe’s largest bank, with $3 trillion in assets. Shell is among the world’s largest energy producers, with $284 billion in 12-month sales and $16 billion in net profit, though both of those numbers have slightly declined year over year.

The Global 2000 ranks the largest companies in the world using four metrics: sales, profits, asset and market value. As a group, the 68 companies from the United Kingdom account for $2.1 trillion in sales, $164 billion in profits, $13.8 trillion in assets and $2.9 trillion in market value. We used the latest 12 months of financial data available to us as of April 25, 2015 to calculate the factors used in our rankings.