Why a figure here can differ from the press release
Every number on this site links to the filing it came from, so the figure itself is rarely in doubt. What changes is the frame around it. These are the four reasons a reader most often writes in to say "that is not the number I saw".
1. The company restated it
When a company sells a division, changes an accounting policy or corrects an error, it republishes prior years in its next annual report. The SEC's data keeps the most recent version of each year. So the 2023 revenue shown here can be lower than the 2023 revenue announced in early 2024 — not because anyone made a mistake, but because the company itself has since revised it. The restated figure is the one to use.
2. The fiscal year is not the calendar year
Apple's year ends in September, Walmart's in January, Microsoft's in June. The SEC assigns each annual figure to the calendar year it mostly overlaps, and so do we: "fiscal 2025" is the twelve months a company itself calls 2025, whatever the end date. A press release about "the year to March 2026" and a row labelled 2025 can describe the same twelve months.
3. It was reported in another currency
Foreign issuers report in yen, euros, Canadian dollars or pounds. Rankings need one currency, so those figures are converted to US dollars at European Central Bank reference rates — the fiscal-year average for income items, the year-end rate for balance-sheet items. The original figure and the rate used are printed on the company's page; a dollar figure that moved while the euro figure did not is a currency story, not a business one.
| Currency | Companies | Largest example |
|---|---|---|
| CAD | 41 | Toronto Dominion Bank |
| EUR | 28 | Stellantis |
| GBP | 12 | GSK |
| BRL | 7 | Ambev |
| JPY | 6 | Mitsubishi Ufj Financial |
| ZAR | 3 | Sasol |
| AUD | 2 | Westpac Banking |
| CHF | 2 | On Holding |
| DKK | 1 | Novo Nordisk A S |
| SEK | 1 | Ericsson LM Telephone |
| MXN | 1 | BBB Foods |
| ILS | 1 | G Willi Food International |
4. Gross versus net revenue
A small number of companies — exchanges and brokers, mostly — book the entire value of the transactions they handle as revenue, so a firm with a few billion in assets can report hundreds of billions in "sales". The figure is what they filed and it stays on their page, but such companies are kept out of the revenue and margin rankings, and their pages say why. A ranking that put a trading platform above Berkshire Hathaway on revenue would be technically correct and practically useless.
None of this is advice, and none of it is an estimate: every figure is read from a filing the company signed. If you find a number that still looks wrong after these four checks, the contact page explains how to report it — with the company, the figure and the year, so it can be checked against the original document.