The companies on the Global 500 employ 70.2 million people, and their revenue represents more than one-third of the world’s GDP.

Fortune Global 500

The corporations on our annual list of the world's 500 largest companies combined to generate $41.7 trillion in revenue over the past year.

The corporations on our annual list posted aggregate revenues of $41 trillion for the second year in a row.

The corporations on our annual list of the world’s largest companies delivered a record $41 trillion in aggregate revenues.

Aggregate sales hit $37.8 trillion last year—an increase of 19%, the highest annual growth rate in the list’s history.

Total revenue for the world’s biggest companies fell 4.8% to $31.7 trillion this year—the first decline in half a decade.

G500-2021-215-Kia

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $33.3 trillion in revenues and $2.1 trillion in profits.

G500-2020-229-Kia-Motors

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $27.7 trillion in revenues and $1.5 trillion in profits.

This year's Fortune Global 500 generated $27.6 trillion in revenues and $1.5 trillion in profits.

The world's 500 largest companies generated $31.2 trillion in revenues and $1.7 trillion in profits in 2014. Together, this year's Fortune Global 500 employ 65 million people worldwide and are represented by 36 countries.

Global business is back. After limping through a worldwide financial crisis and economic slowdown, the 500 largest companies ranked by revenues shattered all sorts of performance records in 2013: They racked up combined revenues of $31.1 trillion, up 2.5% from 2012, and profits soared 27% to nearly $2 trillion. China’s 95 companies (up from 89 last year) posted $5.8 trillion in revenues. The U.S. has four fewer companies on the list than last year but remains (for now) the country leader, with 128 corporations on the list—including No. 1 Wal-Mart Stores—reporting $8.6 trillion in revenues. 

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Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni met as roommates at Stanford. Now, they’re the cofounders of Phia, an AI-powered shopping agent that just raised an $8 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins and has participation from household names like Hailey Bieber,  Kris Jenner, and Sheryl Sandberg. For this episode of Term Sheet, Allie spoke with Phoebe, Sophia, and Annie Case, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, about what’s wrong with online shopping today, how to build a consumer company, why there aren’t more women building companies, and what AI tools can bring to the digital shopping experience.

Inside Phia's $8 Million Seed Round

Tech

Joe Kiani, cofounder and CEO of med tech company Masimo, opens up about the company’s ongoing legal battle with Apple over alleged patent infringement and trade-secret theft, as well as the proxy battle he's currently embroiled in with his board. Note: Apple continues to deny Masimo’s IP claims.

The inventor behind Apple’s watch shutdown discusses lawsuit and proxy battle

Photo illustration by Fortune. Photo provided by Masimo.

Leadership

Joe Kiani, cofounder and CEO of med tech company Masimo, opens up about the company’s ongoing legal battle with Apple over alleged patent infringement and trade-secret theft. Note: Apple continues to deny Masimo’s IP claims.

Joe Kiani, cofounder and CEO of med tech company Masimo, opens up about the company’s ongoing legal battle with Apple. 

I'm, your affiliation has changed a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Let's just say I don't buy Apple products anymore. Welcome to Leadership. Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I'm Alan Murray and I'm Mia, I uh started Massimo in 1989 in my condominium that had an attached garage. So I guess it was a real garage start up. I had just gotten my masters in the area of adaptive filters and A I signal processing. And before starting Massimo, I had a consulting job where I was working for another company to make a, a low-cost pulse flexy while I was trying to develop this cheap pulse oximetry for them. I realized when I moved with the probe on my finger, my oxygen saturation would go from 98 to 100% 70 or 60%. And I knew my physiology hadn't changed. It was just a small motion of my hand. I set out to solve that problem. I know I knew about a class of filters known as adaptive filters that could figure out uh what frequencies to let in and what frequencies to block. Kind of like your noise canceling headphones. Um And I thought I could use that to get rid of this NBA noise where my motion was in the same bandwidth as the signal we were looking for. I took a $40,000 loan on my condominium. Uh and then friends and family invested another $80,000 several months later. And with that, we created basketball. And today we're a publicly traded company with nearly $2 billion in revenue and about 10,000 employees. I'm gonna ask you the Apple question. I know your company, you and your company have come up against some, some pretty significant challenges. And, and I want to hear uh again a little bit of an origin, origin story of just uh the, the legal battle with Apple and how that started. Take us back if, if you don't mind, we introduced a product called IP 02, which was the first pulse oximetry for the smartphones. A few months later, we got a call from Apple uh saying, hey, we want to meet with you, you guys are the platinum of noninvasive monitoring and we'll sign an ND A come tell us everything we want to work with you. So I was excited. I really wanted to work with Apple and I went there personally with a couple of my team members and spent half a day with them. Uh The meeting went really well and I thought we're gonna work together. But unfortunately, a few months later uh I learned that they're trying to recruit my team. They ended up taking 25 of my team members or CTO. Fast forward. In 2019, I saw six patents issued to Apple. All impulsive symmetry, all with our chief technical officer that used to work for our sister company, uh Willow Circle Corps and one of the, the disclosures, well, all of them were on our stuff. One of them was a trade secret. It wasn't even something we patented. So at that point, we decided to sue them for trade secret and later patent infringement. Fortunately, the uh it's not, I can't say it's a happy ending because we're not done, done yet, but we got a win, a major win at the ITC Apple's watches with Pulse Symmetry were enjoined in the US. Um And they're appealing it, I don't think they're gonna win the appeal. We have a really strong case. Uh But uh we're waiting for that. That's probably about a year away, but there's still a couple of trials left to go and uh hopefully we'll ultimately get our justice. There's this ongoing proxy battle now, um which we can get into, I'm sure you love this topic. Um But, but tell me first about the acquisition because it's a really interesting one for you guys. I mean, audio in general, um which you just talked about, I think would surprise some people. But how did the acquisition come about for Sound United. We've been working on our wearables and the Hears for many, many years, maybe 15 years as it was emerging, ready to come out. We try to create our own team, uh president of Consumer Business salesforce and it was daunting slow. And finally, one of our board members, Julie Simer. She said, Joe, if you really are serious about these products, you're gonna have to acquire a company that's already in the consumer space. We ended up buying Sound United because it had not only some of the features, we were looking for a team that had a focus on sales and marketing to consumers, about 3 400 people, engineering uh team that was really good at audio and we were getting into the hears. So we wanted that but they also had relationships across the world with retailers in the consumer space like Best Buy, we ended up buying them for about one time revenue with positive cash flow. It was non diluted from day one and uh we loved some of the products they had, they were iconic brands, high-end brands that we thought would sustain for maybe a century if needed to. Your shareholders weren't as enthusiastic about this acquisition. Did that catch you by surprise? What did you make of it? It did, it did because I'm not new to this. I just, we're celebrating our 35th anniversary and it's not the first time I took on a giant and we beat them and we won. So I believe my track record would put them at ease that I haven't lost my mind. There's a new large opportunity. We're gonna go from a $10 billion.10 total available market to like 100 and $50 billion.10. And with good reasons why we should be a major player in those spaces like continuous monitoring. Why people buy these wearables most of the time they're buying it for the health sensing and there's about a third of the population that buy these smart watches that have chronic illnesses. So I thought once we explain where we're going and I knew we're going to consumer space and they understood why we bought it. They would appreciate it. Um, unfortunately, yeah, you're right. They did not. I think uh I learned the hard way that while we have some shareholders that may have been with us for a decade, they make that decision on an annual basis. It's not like they decide they're going to be in it for 10 years. If it keeps raising the price goes up on the stock, 10 15% a year, they're happy and they keep staying in their stock. They didn't want to take a step back to jump 10 steps forward. Uh So I think there's a mismatch. I run Massimo as though it's gonna be around another 100 years and I need to figure out how to make sure it's there 100 years from now. And I think our investors invest in Massimo thinking about the year ahead and uh that kind of took them. Um I think out of that mode because they knew there would be some investment period before we would uh come out with great results.

Sophia Kianni, Founder, Climate Cardinals; Youth Advisor, UN Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change
Interviewer: Lindsey Stanberry, FORTUNE

Impact Initiative 2022 - Translating Climate Activism 

Conferences

Okay, so english, maybe the international language of business and science. But if you're one of the billions of people in the world who doesn't speak english, how do you access uh critical information uh about things like climate uh enter climate Cardinals and international nonprofit with thousands of volunteers that translate climate information you know into over 100 different languages. We're gonna ask the 20 year old founder about the importance of that of getting non the non english word out. And we're also gonna dive into her work as a U. N. Youth advisor, please welcome to the stage. Sophia Kiani, founder of Climate Cardinals Youth advisor to the U. N. Uh in conversation with fortunes Lindsay Stansbury. Welcome. It's so excited to have you here. You are so impressive. 20 you're a junior at stanford. You are on the U. N. Advisory council. The youngest member, correct. Um can you tell us about climate cardinals and what you what you're doing? Yeah, of course. Uh So climate Cardinals is a nonprofit that I founded when I was a senior in high school and it was inspired by my experiences growing up visiting Iran when I was in middle school. So both of my parents are from Iran and I grew up visiting my grandmother's house in the summers and after my sixth grade class on climate change when I went back to Iran, I was really looking at the situation through a new lens where I realized that the air pollution there that was hospitalizing thousands of people was really a symptom of the climate crisis and that temperatures in the Middle East were rising more than twice the global average. Um and even more horrifying was the fact that my relatives didn't know anything about climate change or global warming. They had never heard those terms. And part of it was because there was a lack of resources available in Farsi, which is Iran's native language. So I worked with my mom to translate climate resources into Farsi so that I could teach my relatives about climate change, which is how I came up with the idea for climate cardinals. So you're all over the world translating climate literature into all different languages. How did you get started doing this? How did you mobilize such a huge audience? Well, initially I started out by volunteering with some of the largest grassroots climate organizations in the world. So I worked with Greta's Fridays for future and extinction rebellion and I realized that pretty much all of those organizations only had their resources available in english. Um and with my experience in Iran as well, in my senior year of high school, I decided to work with a few of my friends to launch climate cardinals. Um and we actually ended up launching on Tiktok and on the very first day that we launched our launch video went viral and it reached a couple 100,000 people and we had over 1000 people signed up to work with us. And so now three years later we actually have had over 9000 young people with an average age of six, sign up to volunteer with us, but it was really always kick started because of social media and because we were able to use Tiktok and instagram and all of these organic marketing campaigns, $0. And I'd spent to reach hundreds of thousands of people. That's amazing the power of social media, right? I want to open it up to the audience. Um if anyone has any questions, um you know, the media paints a very wide picture of gen Z, I'll say that lots of different opinions on it, but I think one of the big topics of conversation that I see is that gen Z is so motivated by climate change, that they're even considering not taking jobs or taking specific jobs. What do you think that, you know, the members of this audience can be learning from your generation about the climate crisis? I think really what makes my generation so unique is that we do have a very value oriented way of approaching work in the sense that at stanford, I've seen increasingly, my friends are hesitant to take jobs that they feel like are from companies that are greenwashing or who aren't really true climate champions. Uh and I think it's really setting a precedent for how companies need to start thinking about engaging with the next generation of youth consumers. Uh and I did a lot of work, I worked as a senior partner of social impact of gen Z marketing agencies. So I consulted for a number of different fortune 500 companies and I did find that those that were the most willing to engage directly with young people and to create youth advisory councils to have young people in high level senior positions, they were more likely to be receptive to feedback and act implement and engage with their audience in a way that I think was very beneficial for them. And similar to how the U. N. Has a youth advisory group on climate change, I think that it is setting a precedent where if businesses are targeting gen Z consumers, then it makes sense to actually engage that audience and make sure that you're developing a product or a service that they're actually going to be receptive to. Do. We have any questions in the audience and I have, I have plenty for you. Sophia are there any, you know, there's a lot of criticism of Gen Z2, is there any stereotypes that really drive you particularly crazy? I think there are a lot of stereotypes. Um I guess I think the notion that um young people are lazy and they waste their time on social media is completely untrue in the sense that part of what I think is so different about activism specifically in this new era is I had this conversation with Sylvia Earle who's a hero of mine and has been a pioneer in the environmental movement and what we talked about was that it used to be that you would have a climate scientist or a policymaker go on tv and they would talk about the urgency of the climate crisis and nobody would listen because it wasn't engaging, it wasn't compelling. And now we have a situation where a young person is able to go on Tiktok make a seven second video and it's able to reach millions of people and people are genuinely compelled. And I think social media has completely revolutionized the way that we look at social impact when even, I don't know if you guys remember when that video went viral of the turtle with the straw up its nose and it ended up sparking all of these mass bands of plastic straws and all it really took was one video being shared widely across social media to have that insane impact. And so I think we are the Tiktok generation. That's completely true, but I don't think that it should be held in with this negative connotation. But I do think that the way that young people have been able to leverage social media to push for social impact initiatives has been truly incredible and I think it's revolutionizing the way that we look at activism, What are some of the challenges that you find motivating this audience though? I know that you have so many young people who are signing up, but do you find that they sign up in a moment of anxiety and then don't follow through? How do you keep them engaged? Well, climate cardinals has been able to translate over 750,000 words of climate resources into over 100 languages. And we've grown to 9000 volunteers in over 40 countries. And this has been sustained growth over the last three years. Uh, and so I I would definitely say that young people are enthusiastic, they want to work, they want volunteer service hours. Um, and I think it has not been difficult to motivate people at all. And I get dozens of emails every single day from young people from all over the world who asked me if they can work with climate cardinals, how they can get involved because young people genuinely truly care about climate action. And it makes sense when you look at the science and the research, when it's saying that my generation is experiencing the impacts of the climate crisis at a rate three times higher than our grandparents, of course we're gonna be compelled to want to take action. Of course we're gonna start grassroots organizations that are schools. Of course we're gonna start global nonprofits because we have no other choice, especially when we've seen the lack of action by corporate actors, by politicians. We feel like we want to take our future into our own hands. We've talked a little bit about um fortune apathy. This feeling that that we can't fix this problem. I think that that while it's wonderful to see you and the climate cardinals really like take big next step. We're also hearing from people that you know they don't care about their careers, they don't necessarily care about saving for future because there may be no future. What do you say to people who feel an apathy about um taking action? That's actually been one of my rallying calls and one of my biggest learnings at the U. N. Is that we need to get more people from being apathetic towards the climate crisis towards becoming activists. And that's another thing where I think the word activism has gained a lot of negative connotations over the last few years, but I truly believe that everyone can be an activist and there is no specific definition attacked the term in the sense that I didn't wake up one day and end up advising the U. N. And having a global nonprofit. It was a series of steps in an iteration. And I think similarly all it really takes for someone to begin their journeys and activists is to take that first step to evaluate how can I change my corporate culture in a way that I think is better for the younger generation or better for the planet. And I think about it often through the lens of how my friends look at it. Which is that my friends who are studying fashion for example, they're looking at how they can engineer more sustainable textile. And then my friends were studying computer science and engineering. They're looking at how they can improve modeling for making solar panels more efficient for example. And so across all different disciplines there is the potential and power to make impact. It really is about identifying what is your specific cause initiative and how can you make, how are you best positioned to make the biggest difference where there are dozens, if not hundreds, of thousands, of climate organizations. And I never wanted to duplicate the efforts of another organization, which is why I started climate cardinals because we're the first and only organization that's working to translate climate resources into now over 100 languages. And I I often also say if a group of ragtag teenagers that congregates through social media can do this work with very little budget, imagine the impact that a concentrated effort by governments policymakers, scientists and corporate leaders could have, especially with so much more money and so much more influence. And so we've been able to mobilize this global movement just from my childhood bedroom and I very much expect that a similar momentum and similar impact can be achieved if not to attend fold scale from corporate boardrooms. But I think that it comes with having a level of accountability but also having a vision and being in tired. I had to be inspired by schooling through my Tiktok feed to feel like I can make an impact and I think similarly, it really starts with feeling like you're in a position to make an impact and then taking those first steps and hopefully be power of young people and what we've been able to accomplish can inspire you guys to also feel similarly that you can be poised to make an impact. I always say never underestimate the power of a teenage girl, they really are going to rule the world one day. Um question Well, thank you so much. I, I am deeply impressed, like everyone else I see you on online etcetera. So I educate board of directors, executives etcetera. And from time to time I hear, well look at all these young people, they got all the ideas they will come and they will save the world. Should we just wait for you guys or should we do something? Well, I don't know why you would wait for us when you have an opportunity to directly engage with us, which is something that I've been really adamant about championing in the sense that if I, as an 18 year old have had had the opportunity to be appointed to advise the head of the United Nations and I'm now 20 almost turning 21 then I think every single Ceo should also be taking up the same mantle of realizing that we are not just the future, we are now and we're already making such a tremendous impact and I think there's also a lot of value that bringing young people into conversations can have. I mean I'm invited to conferences like this all the time and so often I have people come up to me afterwards and say, oh I'm so inspired, like this has really changed the way that I'm thinking and I counter that by saying, well imagine the impact that this sustained conversation would have. And that's why it helps to establish the different youth advisory boards and different youth initiatives to actually directly have people engage with young people. Because I do think that there is a sense of urgency that is created when it comes to sitting down and talking to someone who could be your daughter, who could be your granddaughter and hearing their legitimate concerns. But then also in addition to concerns, hearing about solutions. I mean so often I talk talk to companies and I talked to them about the potential of social media and Tiktok and they're like, oh we, we never even thought about making a Tiktok account and things like that are actually really important. I mean look at dueling, go look at some of the more recent successful examples of companies successfully leveraging social media to really resonate with gen Z. And so much of that comes with having like a young intern or having a youth advisory group that's able to give that strategic guidance, Maybe fortune needs a youth advisory group. Another question, Yeah, Ross wants Ceo Athena Music wellness, I'm focusing wellness education. So I like to hear what James's thoughts and what James's actions in terms of mental health. Thank you. Mental health is such an important topic specifically within climate because increasingly psychologists are saying that young people are suffering from a phenomenon known as eco anxiety, which is a debilitating fear about the state of the climate crisis. And I do think that when you look also at what companies are doing, rare beauty has made mental uh impact, for example, a core pillar of what they're doing and I think it's part of the reason why they have become such a fan favorite among young people. Uh and also when we look at telehealth services, for example, that's another really big thing where young people are increasingly attending on line therapy and looking for more accessible ways to improve their mental health. So I do think it's a really huge emerging space and mental health and conversation surrounding mental health are really a priority to young people because I think it also comes along with a sense of increased transparency and accountability that we're increasing, looking for uh in companies, but also in our day to day conversation. Sophia, thank you so much you, this is so incredible, you're such an inspiration, I really appreciate you coming here. I don't you're such an amazing representative of gen Z, I'm not sure when you sleep. Um I definitely don't think I get enough sleep, but you know sometimes you have to give and take, but life is about balance. Thank you so much. Thank you. Well now we all have to do list um and it's time to take a break, so this is the perfect timing. Um we're gonna take a break from the main stage conversation. You'll have 25 minutes to catch up with old friends. Make new ones, have some coffee, coke products. Um we'll see you back here at the main stage at 12:00. Thanks.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Before you launched in this current iteration, you launched a different kind of model that didn't work so well. But what was that? And why didn't it work? Yeah, I started this company because I was looking for a ballet class. I went onto the internet. I was completely lost in terms of which studio to go to. I had 15 different tabs open. And that's when I realized that there needed to be a directory for all these classes. So the initial concept was very similar to Open Tables, ZocDoc, Seamless Web. Lets put all the classes in one place. And that was great. I think it was informative. But we didn't have the motivating criteria of making it feel accessible and the discovery that people wanted to. And as we went and moved over to a membership, it became more motivating. And it became more frictionless to get to these studios. And that's when we started seeing the engagement number and our number of reservations skyrocket. So what advice would you give to another entrepreneur who launched one way and realized it's not working the way they thought and need to pivot? What did you learn from that? You can't get stuck. When you feel like something's not working, trust your gut. And don't get sort of lost in saying, well, we spent money doing it. Let's not move. I think we were very OK with being like, this isn't working. We tried a little bit. And we very quickly knew it wasn't going to work. We just went in a different direction. And we weren't afraid of failing. And we actually liked failure because it gave us a data point to say, that's not working. Let's go in the right direction to actually achieve our mission. I also think having a mission from your core is so important. And knowing that you want to achieve that also motivates your team to constantly strive toward saying, you know what, we're going to keep going until we get there. And it feels so great once you finally are able to realize your mission. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Insights: The Best Way to View a Startup Failure

Uncategorized

ClassPass CEO explains the company's much-needed change.

The Best Way to View a Startup Failure

ClassPass CEO Payal Kadakia explains the company's much-needed change. (December 2015)

before you launch in this current iteration, you launched a different kind of model that didn't work so well. But what was that? Why didn't it work? Yeah, you know, I started this company because I was looking for a ballet class. I went onto the Internet. I was completely lost in terms of which studio to Goto. I had 15 different tabs open, and that's when I realized that there needed to be a directory for all these classes. So the initial concept was very similar. Open Table Doc, Doc scene with Webb. Let's put all the classes in one place, and that was great. I think it was informative, but we didn't have the motivating criteria of making it feel accessible in the discovery that people wanted to. And as we went and moved over to a membership, it became a motivating, and it became more frictionless to get to the studios. And that's when we started seeing the engagement number and our number of reservations skyrocket. What advice would you give to another entrepreneur who launched one way and realize it's not working the way they thought and need to pivot? What did you learn from that? you know you can't get stuck right when you feel like something's not working, trust your gut and don't get sort of lost and saying, Well, we spent money doing it. Let's not move. I think we were very okay with being like This isn't working. We tried a little bit when we very quickly knew it wasn't going to work. We just went a different direction and we had We weren't afraid of failing, and we actually liked failure because it gave us a data point. Say, That's not working. Let's go in the right direction, toe actually achieve our mission. I also think like having a mission from your core so important, and knowing that you want to achieve that also motivates your team to constantly strive toward thing. You know what, we're gonna keep going until we get there and it feels overly once you finally are able to realize your mission

Kia

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Kia in Fortune Rankings

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