What are the biggest companies in Europe, according to their revenue? According to Fortune, it’s largely companies in the automative, energy and finance sectors.

The second edition of the Fortune 500 Europe is dominated by the likes of German car maker Volkswagen, which has risen to number-one spot this year, and features several of the continent’s industrial powerhouses. In fact, it features many of Germany’s leading companies.

But the authors of the index have pointed to something interesting: the makeup of the 2024 list looks very similar to a list of the top 500 most revenue-generating companies of the US, if you looked at it almost 20 years ago, before the likes of Google and Meta came to dominate the country’s economy.

‘Why does this matter?’ asks Fortune’s executive editor, Europe, Alex Wood Morton. ‘It’s the long-term outlook – many of the companies topping the European 500 today face an existential crisis as the world adapts to climate change and competition from China.’

Take Germany, for example. The traditional powerhouse provides 80 companies that make up Europe’s top 500, collectively racking up $3.2 trn in revenues last year or a fifth of the overall total. Volkswagen has knocked energy giant Shell off the top spot, while BMW and Mercedes-Benz are hot on its tail in the top 10.

A pinch of knowledge about the current European economic landscape will inform most readers, however, that this is a short-lived victory. The ranking is based on revenues for 2023; the country’s lead may have evaporated in 2024, amid a slump in GDP and an anticipated decline in Germany’s economy over the past two years, which will be confirmed when figures that track it are eventually published early next year. 

Fortune adds: ‘Despite revenue for the Fortune 500 Europe growing as a whole by 5.2 percent in 2023, cumulative revenue for German companies on the list contracted by 2.6 percent.’

There are a number of reasons for this – a continued drop in energy exports following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a drop in exports to China – which economists expect to become more entrenched.

On the other hand, the tech revolution that has been underway in the US over the past 20 years may well come to pass in Europe, albeit driven by AI rather than the maturation of the internet. While there are only 15 tech firms in this year’s top 500 (compared to 49 in Fortune’s ranking of US firms), legacy firms are quickly discovering that AI could help them transform. Fortune says it could be ‘akin to the canal boom of the 18th century’.

Foremost among those is the top-ranking firm, Volkswagen, which launched its own AI company in January and is developing deeper uses of generative AI and large-language models to help create the basis for autonomous driving in the future.

Where those efforts will lead the car maker and its peers remains to be seen. But all eyes will be on Europe’s top companies to see if they can replicate even a fraction of the success of Google, Amazon or Nvidia in the next few decades.

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