How concentrated are company profits?
Revenue rankings are the ones people look at, but revenue is a measure of size, not of success. Profit is the harder number, and it is distributed very differently: it clusters in far fewer companies than revenue does, and a substantial share of companies report none at all. Both tables below are recomputed from the filings every time the data is refreshed.
Where the profit sits
This table takes every company in the catalogue that reported net income for the base fiscal year, sorts the profitable ones from largest profit to smallest, and shows what share of the combined profit each group accounts for.
| Group | Combined profit | Share of all profit |
|---|---|---|
| Largest 10 by profit | $785B | 26.1% |
| Largest 25 | $1.07T | 35.6% |
| Largest 100 | $1.77T | 58.7% |
| The other 1958 | $1.24T | 41.3% |
One choice in that table is worth stating plainly, because it changes the answer: the denominator is the combined profit of the companies that made one. Loss-makers are counted separately rather than subtracted. Netting the losses off would shrink the denominator and make the top of the list look more dominant than it is — the same data, arranged to flatter a headline. The number of loss-makers, and what they lost between them, is a separate fact worth its own sentence rather than a quiet adjustment to someone else's percentage.
Who reports no profit at all
A company can report a loss for reasons that have nothing to do with trouble: it is spending ahead of revenue, it wrote down an acquisition, it settled a case, it is a clinical-stage business whose product is years from approval. The share of loss-makers therefore says more about what a sector's companies are doing with their money than about whether they are in difficulty — which is why the table below counts them by sector and stops there.
| Sector | Companies | Reporting a loss | Share reporting a loss |
|---|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | 323 | 139 | 43.0% |
| Communication services | 129 | 54 | 41.9% |
| Technology | 563 | 194 | 34.5% |
| Materials | 176 | 59 | 33.5% |
| Consumer discretionary | 356 | 105 | 29.5% |
| Real estate | 155 | 41 | 26.5% |
| Consumer staples | 111 | 28 | 25.2% |
| Energy | 136 | 34 | 25.0% |
| Industrials | 492 | 100 | 20.3% |
| Financials | 328 | 47 | 14.3% |
| Utilities | 101 | 10 | 9.9% |
Sectors with fewer than twenty companies in the catalogue are left out of that table. In a sector of six, one company moving from profit to loss swings the share by seventeen points, and a percentage that unstable is not a finding.
What this catalogue is, and is not
These are not all US public companies. The catalogue holds the largest filers by revenue among those whose annual figures can be read from SEC XBRL data, plus foreign issuers that file a 20-F or 40-F. Companies below that cut, companies that file no revenue figure, and private companies are absent. So read the tables as a description of the large end of the US-listed market, not of the whole economy — and certainly not of companies generally.
Two further limits belong in the open. Net income is the bottom line after tax, interest and one-off items, so a single asset sale or write-down can move a company several places in a single year; that is a property of the measure, not an error in it. And a company whose scale factor was corrected, or whose revenue line turned out to hold only part of its revenue, is handled by the rules described in the other notes here — the same rules apply before these tables are built.
Source: annual figures as filed with the SEC, read from XBRL. Every company page links to the filing behind each number. The tables above are recomputed at each data refresh, so the text stays true as the figures change.