Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Arabian state-owned oil and gas company, is the most profitable company in the world, reporting a net income of approximately $121 billion in 2023. Apple follows closely, posting net income of roughly $97 billion in fiscal year 2023. These two companies sit at the top of a global list defined by extraordinary scale, pricing power, and structural advantages that most businesses never achieve.
Understanding which companies generate the most profit, and how they do it, gives founders and operators a clearer map of what durable profitability actually looks like. The companies on this list span oil, technology, banking, and consumer goods, but they share common traits: strong pricing power, recurring revenue, and businesses that are genuinely difficult to replicate. For business builders, the strategic lesson is not “be as big as Aramco” but rather “understand what makes margins like this possible.” Each entry below includes one transferable insight designed to be applied at any scale.
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The 20 Most Profitable Companies in the World
1. What company makes the most profit in the world?
Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabian Oil Company)
Net income: approximately $121 billion (2023)
Saudi Aramco is the national oil company of Saudi Arabia and the world’s largest oil producer by volume. Its cost of production per barrel is among the lowest on earth, which means it retains an outsized share of every dollar of revenue as profit.
Strategic takeaway: Low unit cost is a moat. If your cost structure is fundamentally cheaper than every competitor, profitability becomes structural rather than cyclical.
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2. Which tech company is the most profitable?
Apple Inc.
Net income: approximately $97 billion (fiscal year 2023)
Apple designs consumer electronics, software, and services, and its profit engine has shifted meaningfully toward high-margin services like the App Store, Apple Music, and iCloud. The hardware business creates the installed base; the services business extracts recurring profit from it.
Strategic takeaway: Build a product that creates a captive ecosystem, then layer services on top. The hardware can break even if the services margins are high enough.
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3. How profitable is Microsoft?
Microsoft Corporation
Net income: approximately $88 billion (fiscal year 2024)
Microsoft sells software, cloud computing (through Azure), and productivity tools (Office 365) to businesses and consumers worldwide. Its shift to subscription-based and cloud-delivered software transformed one-time purchases into predictable, recurring cash flows.
Strategic takeaway: Recurring revenue smooths income volatility. Wherever possible, convert a transaction into a subscription.
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4. How much profit does Alphabet make?
Alphabet Inc. (Google’s parent company)
Net income: approximately $74 billion (2023)
Alphabet’s core business is digital advertising sold through Google Search and YouTube, two platforms with combined daily user bases in the billions. Advertising margins benefit from the fact that Google’s search index and AI infrastructure were built once and now serve trillions of queries at near-zero marginal cost.
Strategic takeaway: Zero marginal cost at scale is the ultimate profit multiplier. Intellectual property and software create this; physical goods rarely do.
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5. Is JPMorgan Chase the most profitable bank?
JPMorgan Chase
Net income: approximately $50 billion (2023)
JPMorgan Chase is the largest bank in the United States by assets and the most profitable bank in the world. Its profits in 2023 were boosted by higher interest rates, which widened the spread between what the bank earns on loans and what it pays on deposits.
Strategic takeaway: Understand how macroeconomic conditions affect your margins. A rising rate environment was a structural tailwind for banks; knowing your external levers is as important as managing internal costs.
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6. How profitable is Meta Platforms?
Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook)
Net income: approximately $39 billion (2023)
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and monetizes those platforms almost entirely through targeted digital advertising. After a difficult 2022 driven by heavy investment in the metaverse, Meta’s “Year of Efficiency” cost-cutting in 2023 dramatically expanded its profit margins.
Strategic takeaway: Profitability is partly a cost discipline decision, not just a revenue question. Cutting low-return spending can restore margins faster than chasing new revenue.
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7. What are the most profitable oil companies besides Aramco?
ExxonMobil
Net income: approximately $36 billion (2023)
ExxonMobil is one of the largest publicly traded oil and gas companies in the world, with operations spanning exploration, refining, and chemicals. Its 2023 profits were lower than the record highs of 2022 but still reflected a business with significant scale and global diversification.
Strategic takeaway: Diversification across a value chain (extraction, refining, retail) creates profit stability even when one segment underperforms.
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8. How much does Berkshire Hathaway earn?
Berkshire Hathaway
Net income: approximately $96 billion (2023, including investment gains)
Berkshire Hathaway is a conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett, owning businesses ranging from insurance (GEICO) to railroads (BNSF) to energy. Its reported net income fluctuates significantly because it includes unrealized investment gains, but its operating earnings (the preferred measure of underlying business performance) were roughly $37 billion in 2023.
Strategic takeaway: Understand the difference between accounting profit and operating cash generation. Operating earnings tell you more about sustainable business performance than GAAP net income.
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9. How profitable is NVIDIA in the AI era?
NVIDIA Corporation
Net income: approximately $30 billion (fiscal year 2024)
NVIDIA designs graphics processing units (GPUs) that have become the primary hardware for training and running artificial intelligence models. The explosion in AI investment from technology companies and governments drove NVIDIA’s revenue and profit to record levels in 2023 and 2024.
Strategic takeaway: Owning the infrastructure layer of a technological wave can be more profitable than building applications on top of it. The “picks and shovels” approach has proven durable across multiple technology cycles.
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10. Which Chinese company is the most profitable?
Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC)
Net income: approximately $48 billion (2023)
ICBC is the world’s largest bank by total assets and the most profitable company headquartered in China. Its profitability is underpinned by China’s enormous domestic deposit base and a decades-long expansion of the country’s middle class.
Strategic takeaway: Market size is a legitimate moat. Access to the world’s largest consumer market provides a profit floor that competitors in smaller markets cannot replicate.
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11. How profitable is Chevron compared to other oil majors?
Chevron Corporation
Net income: approximately $21 billion (2023)
Chevron is a major U.S.-based integrated oil and gas company. Its 2023 profit was lower than 2022’s record due to declining energy prices, illustrating how commodity-linked businesses face earnings volatility regardless of operational quality.
Strategic takeaway: Commodity businesses require strong balance sheets to survive downturns. Profit in boom years should fund resilience, not only shareholder returns.
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12. Is Samsung one of the world’s most profitable companies?
Samsung Electronics
Net income: approximately $16 billion (2023)
Samsung Electronics is South Korea’s largest company and a global leader in semiconductors, smartphones, and consumer electronics. Its semiconductor division faced severe margin compression in 2023 due to an oversupplied memory chip market, cutting its profits sharply from 2022’s peak of roughly $35 billion.
Strategic takeaway: Cyclical industries require profit discipline at the peak. Samsung’s cycle illustrates that even dominant market positions cannot fully insulate a company from commodity pricing dynamics.
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13. How much profit does Visa generate?
Visa Inc.
Net income: approximately $17 billion (fiscal year 2023)
Visa operates the world’s largest payment network, processing transactions between cardholders, merchants, and banks. Visa does not lend money, so it carries no credit risk, making its business model unusually capital-light for its scale.
Strategic takeaway: Position yourself in the middle of a transaction rather than as one of the parties. Network intermediaries often capture value without taking on the risks that the principal parties bear.
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14. How profitable is Johnson & Johnson?
Johnson & Johnson
Net income: approximately $35 billion (2023)
Johnson & Johnson is a U.S.-based healthcare conglomerate with major businesses in pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Its pharmaceutical segment, which includes patented drugs sold at premium prices, generates the majority of its earnings.
Strategic takeaway: Patent protection is a temporary but powerful profit enabler. Businesses built on intellectual property must invest continuously in the next generation of protected products.
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15. Is Walmart profitable despite thin margins?
Walmart Inc.
Net income: approximately $15 billion (fiscal year 2024)
Walmart is the world’s largest retailer by revenue, with net profit margins that are thin (typically around 2 to 3 percent) but applied to revenue exceeding $600 billion. Its profits also benefit increasingly from Walmart Connect, its high-margin advertising business built on first-party shopper data.
Strategic takeaway: Low-margin, high-volume businesses can generate significant absolute profit. The secondary revenue stream (in Walmart’s case, advertising) is where the margin expansion actually lives.
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16. How much profit does TSMC make?
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)
Net income: approximately $26 billion (2023)
TSMC is the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer, producing semiconductors for Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and hundreds of other companies. Its technical leadership in advanced chip fabrication creates a near-monopoly on the most critical components of modern electronics.
Strategic takeaway: Technical complexity at the frontier can create a monopoly without any formal market protection. If you are the only party who can reliably do something essential, pricing power follows automatically.
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17. Is Alibaba still among the most profitable companies?
Alibaba Group
Net income: approximately $11 billion (fiscal year 2024)
Alibaba is China’s largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. Its profits have been pressured since 2021 by Chinese regulatory actions and intensifying domestic competition from platforms including Pinduoduo and JD.com.
Strategic takeaway: Regulatory and competitive risk can erode platform profitability rapidly. Diversifying revenue streams (Alibaba’s cloud business, international commerce) provides a partial buffer.
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18. How profitable is UnitedHealth Group?
UnitedHealth Group
Net income: approximately $22 billion (2023)
UnitedHealth Group is the largest health insurance company in the United States and one of the most profitable companies in healthcare globally. It operates both an insurance business (UnitedHealthcare) and a healthcare services business (Optum), creating a vertically integrated model that captures margin at multiple points in the healthcare value chain.
Strategic takeaway: Vertical integration can convert external costs into internal profit. When a company can own adjacent steps in its own supply chain, it captures margin that would otherwise go to suppliers or competitors.
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19. Which luxury goods company is the most profitable?
LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton
Net income: approximately $15 billion (2023)
LVMH is a French conglomerate owning more than 75 luxury brands, including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Moët & Chandon, and Bulgari. Its profit margins benefit from pricing power rooted in brand desirability rather than technological differentiation.
Strategic takeaway: Brand desirability is a form of pricing power that does not require a technology moat. Consistent quality, controlled distribution, and cultural cachet can sustain premium margins across decades.
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20. How profitable is Amazon?
Amazon.com Inc.
Net income: approximately $30 billion (2023)
Amazon is the world’s largest e-commerce company and cloud provider. Its profitability has historically been driven less by retail (which runs on thin margins) and more by Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud computing division, which generates a disproportionate share of operating income.
Strategic takeaway: A high-margin business unit can subsidize a lower-margin one, enabling aggressive pricing that builds market share. Knowing which business unit actually funds the others is essential strategic clarity.
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Comparison Table: Most Profitable Companies in the World (2026)
| Rank | Company | Net Income (Most Recent Year) | Year | Primary Industry |
| — | — | — | — | — |
| 1 | Saudi Aramco | ~$121 billion | 2023 | Oil and Gas |
| 2 | Apple | ~$97 billion | FY2023 | Technology / Consumer Electronics |
| 3 | Berkshire Hathaway | ~$96 billion (incl. investment gains) | 2023 | Diversified / Insurance |
| 4 | Microsoft | ~$88 billion | FY2024 | Technology / Cloud Software |
| 5 | Alphabet (Google) | ~$74 billion | 2023 | Technology / Digital Advertising |
| 6 | ICBC | ~$48 billion | 2023 | Banking |
| 7 | JPMorgan Chase | ~$50 billion | 2023 | Banking |
| 8 | Meta Platforms | ~$39 billion | 2023 | Technology / Digital Advertising |
| 9 | ExxonMobil | ~$36 billion | 2023 | Oil and Gas |
| 10 | Johnson & Johnson | ~$35 billion | 2023 | Healthcare / Pharmaceuticals |
| 11 | NVIDIA | ~$30 billion | FY2024 | Technology / Semiconductors |
| 12 | Amazon | ~$30 billion | 2023 | E-commerce / Cloud Computing |
| 13 | TSMC | ~$26 billion | 2023 | Semiconductors |
| 14 | UnitedHealth Group | ~$22 billion | 2023 | Healthcare / Insurance |
| 15 | Chevron | ~$21 billion | 2023 | Oil and Gas |
| 16 | Visa | ~$17 billion | FY2023 | Financial Services / Payments |
| 17 | Samsung Electronics | ~$16 billion | 2023 | Technology / Consumer Electronics |
| 18 | LVMH | ~$15 billion | 2023 | Luxury Goods |
| 19 | Walmart | ~$15 billion | FY2024 | Retail |
| 20 | Alibaba | ~$11 billion | FY2024 | E-commerce / Cloud Computing |
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FAQ
What is the single most profitable company in the world right now?
Saudi Aramco is the most profitable company in the world, reporting net income of approximately $121 billion in 2023. Its structural advantage is a combination of massive oil reserves and production costs that are among the lowest of any major energy company globally.
Are technology companies more profitable than oil companies?
At the very top, oil still leads: Saudi Aramco’s net income exceeds Apple’s. However, the technology sector as a group generates more aggregate profit than any other industry, with Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, NVIDIA, and Amazon all ranking in the global top 20. Technology companies also tend to grow profits faster and with lower capital requirements than energy companies.
Why do some companies with huge revenues have low profits?
Revenue and profit are separate metrics. Walmart generates over $600 billion in annual revenue but earns a net profit margin of roughly 2 to 3 percent, while Visa generates far less revenue but keeps a much higher share as profit. Cost structure, pricing power, and business model design, not revenue alone, determine profitability.
How does NVIDIA rank among the most profitable companies given the AI boom?
NVIDIA ranked among the top ten most profitable companies globally for its fiscal year 2024, with net income of approximately $30 billion. Its rapid ascent reflects surging demand for AI training hardware, a market where NVIDIA holds dominant market share through its CUDA software ecosystem as well as its GPU hardware.
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The Business Model Analyst Take
The single most useful insight from this list is that the most profitable companies in the world do not simply sell more. They sell in ways that competitors structurally cannot replicate: at lower cost (Aramco), through a captive ecosystem (Apple), at zero marginal cost at scale (Google Search), or as the only viable supplier of a critical input (TSMC). Revenue growth is something any business can attempt. Structural profitability, the kind that persists across market cycles and competitive attacks, requires owning something genuinely difficult to replicate. The strategic question for every founder and operator is not “how do we grow revenue?” but “what would make our margins indefensible?”
