As times seem uncertain and many companies seem to be on the brink of collapse, or have even collapsed due to the pandemic, let’s change tactics and take a look at the 10 most profitable companies in the world in 2020. There is a difference between the biggest companies in the world and the most profitable. For example, Amazon is one of the biggest companies in the entire world, when you take into considerations its revenues and the number of people it employs, but is it also the most profitable? The answer is no. In fact, Amazon made losses for several years as it made gains in market share, and is now almost a monopoly with little oversight. Even now, though it has started turning profits and is in the top 100 profitable companies, it still fails to make our list, as the profits are not significant enough yet. In fact, Walmart is the company with the highest revenue in the world, yet it failed to make our list. In fact, none of the top 5 companies with the highest revenues in the world made the list.
That doesn’t mean that you won’t find familiar big names in our list. In fact it is quite likely that you’ll know most, if not all of the companies especially since most of them are major United States companies. The US has been called a capitalist’s dream, and has produced huge companies with revenues surpassing the GDPs of several nations. It is the only country in the world to produce trillion dollar companies, four of them at last count, which is simply massive.
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In fact, 7 of the 10 companies on our list are from the United States of America, with one contribution each from China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. To determine our rankings, we didn’t just take a look at their profits, which were available here, but we also considered the return on its total assets. There are a myriad number of ways that once can assess the profitability of a company, employing dozens of ratios such as acid test ratio, liquidity ratio, return on capital employed and return on assets. We have used the total profits and return on assets for our ranking, as the return on assets shows what the company is making back on every dollar it invests on its assets. If you want to compare this list to previous years, you may be interested in the most profitable companies in the world in 2017.
10. Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ)
While Johnson & Johnson has been in the news in recent years due to the massive court cases successfully once against them, with one jury verdict hitting them with an astounding $8 billion in fines, it is still one of the biggest companies out there, with profits of $17.2 billion and a strong return on assets of 11.1$.
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