China's Largest Companies 2025: Trade War Clouds The Outlook For China
Sluggish domestic consumption and the prospect of a U.S.-China trade war is already taking its toll among Chinese companies. The total number of companies from China in the 2025 Forbes Global 2000 ranking (including Hong Kong) declined to 317 from 324 last year.
Although China continues to have the second-largest number of companies on the list after the U.S., its count has fallen for three consecutive years after peaking at 351 in 2022. The aggregate revenues of the Chinese companies on the list has been roughly flat at $8.7 trillion in the last 12 months, while cumulative assets ticked up to $62 trillion. Forbes' Global 2000 weighs market value, revenue, profit and assets equally, using the latest 12 months of data as of April 25.
Banking heavyweights are toppers again. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is the highest-ranked Chinese company, at No. 3, up one spot from a year ago. It's also the largest in the world in terms of assets with a staggering $6.7 trillion and the most profitable among Chinese companies logging $51 billion in net profit for the past 12 months. Two other state-controlled banks in the top 10 are China Construction Bank and the Agricultural Bank of China, at No. 7 and No. 8, respectively.
The highest-ranked non-state-owned enterprise is insurance giant Ping An (No. 27), followed by internet juggernauts Alibaba Group Holding (No. 33) and Tencent Holdings (No. 37). The latter is the most valuable in this cohort, with a market cap of $562 billion. Tencent's shares got a boost amid the Chinese tech stock rally fueled by DeepSeek, the Chinese AI rival to ChatGPT launching its first large language model in January and setting the tech world on fire. In terms of revenues, China Petroleum & Chemical, or Sinopec, is the biggest with $390 billion in sales over the past 12 months.
More than half the Chinese companies have dropped in the ranking from last year. Dairy producer China Mengniu Dairy fell 485 spots to No. 1849 as its net profit shrank by 98% to $14 million, partly due to losses incurred by its Australian subsidiary, infant formula maker Bellamy. Notable among the companies that bucked the trend is EV-maker Seres Group, which climbed up 782 spots to No. 904. After teaming with tech giant Huawei (which is privately held hence excluded from these ranks) to launch its Aito smart EV series in 2021, it's overtaken BMW as the top luxury car brand in China with 151,000 units sold last year.
The biggest group of Chinese companies are from banking (51), followed by construction (including real estate) with 43 firms, though most of them have slipped in the ranks amid China's persistent property slump. A surprising name among the 21 returnees this year: distressed real estate developer Country Garden Holdings, which is undergoing a debt restructuring but resumed trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange in January after a 10-month suspension that was imposed when it delayed filing its financial results for 2023.
The three new entrants include bubble tea maker Mixue Group, which listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in March and has become the world's largest food & beverage chain by store count with more than 46,000 outlets. Another new name is toy wunderkind Pop Mart International Group. Shares of the company, which makes the wildly popular rabbit-like Labubu doll that was recently spotted on pop star Rihanna's handbag, are up five-fold from a year ago.
Thirty Chinese companies that made the cut last year dropped off, including three solar panel manufacturers. Notable in this group is Jinko Solar, which was ranked at No. 1044 a year ago but lost its place after net profit plunged 99% to $14 million after bruising competition caused prices of photovoltaic products to plummet.
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