The worldwide economic system in 2024 is a story of two forces: optimism sparked by falling rates of interest, and the uncertainty attributable to geopolitical unrest. As corporations give attention to sustainable development, such a risky setting inevitably assessments their resilience.
Since 2017, Fortune and Boston Consulting Group have teamed as much as establish our annual checklist of Future 50 corporations—these constructed to face up to precisely such volatility. Future 50 companies promise outsize future development whereas delivering distinctive shareholder returns. At BCG, we name these corporations extremely important; they’ve the capability to adapt, innovate, and develop amid technological, financial, and political change. This checklist is designed to be each a software for traders and a information for enterprise leaders in search of companions and position fashions.
This 12 months’s rating is our first to incorporate not simply public corporations but additionally privately held, pre-IPO corporations with over $1 billion in funding. The Future 50 now higher displays the universe of the world’s most important corporations, which is especially precious as venture-backed and private-equity-funded companies more and more keep non-public for longer. We’ve additionally up to date our methodology to incorporate new information sources that permit us to evaluate the scalability of a agency’s expertise stack and the composition of its development and innovation groups. In all, we evaluated 3,000 candidates to generate the ultimate rating.
This 12 months’s Future 50 honorees have seen four-times-greater gross sales development and three-times-greater complete shareholder returns over the previous 5 years than the common firm in our pattern group—hopefully presaging related outcomes to return. Certainly, the Future 50 has traditionally highlighted corporations whose development would later launch them onto the Fortune 500 and Fortune World 500 lists. Nvidia, for one, made its World 500 debut this 12 months, following 5 Future 50 appearances (this 12 months is its sixth). Intuit, ServiceNow, and Workday have equally been featured right here earlier than laddering as much as the Fortune 500.
Tech leads the pack
As in 2023, over half of the Future 50 corporations are software program suppliers, reflecting the notion that “software program is consuming the world” and the scalability benefits of bytes over atoms. High-performing tech corporations additionally consciously apply high-vitality behaviors to take care of management, together with aggressively recruiting prime expertise, investing closely in R&D, and relentlessly driving go-to-market methods.
Most of this 12 months’s software program corporations are business-to-business companies. Cybersecurity and programming help programs are a serious presence, with collaborationsoftware maker Atlassian occupying the No. 1 spot. The info-infrastructure business accounts for a number of gamers, together with No. 9 Snowflake and No. 11 Databricks. On the business-to-consumer facet, gaming platform Roblox (No. 2) and social media giants Snap (No. 12), Mohalla Tech (No. 39), and Kuaishou (No. 41) scored extremely.
AI stays an enormous development engine, as companies broadly transfer from generative AI exploration to adoption. Practically all our Future 50 tech companies function AI of their merchandise, and the checklist contains a number of core basis mannequin and programming gamers, akin to OpenAI (No. 5), Anthropic (No. 46), and Scale AI (No. 27). Nvidia (No. 34) returns to the checklist, after a one-year absence, as the corporate uniquely positioned to energy large-language-model builders with its graphics processing items.
Exterior of software program, the checklist options six corporations driving breakthroughs in biopharmaceuticals and diagnostics. Each vitality corporations on the Future 50 give attention to clear vitality, with Adani Inexperienced Vitality (No. 35) pioneering large-scale photo voltaic and wind initiatives and Commonwealth Fusion (No. 45) working towards the world’s first fusion energy plant. (On Nov. 20, U.S. authorities indicted a number of executives at Adani Inexperienced Vitality’s guardian firm on prices of fraud and bribery associated to the subsidiary. The corporate has denied wrongdoing.)
At No. 40, Celsius Holdings, an energy-drink supplier, is the only shopper enterprise to crack the highest 50, displaying that advertising can nonetheless drive outsize worth for patrons and shareholders.
U.S. maintains management
The checklist additionally exhibits that the US stays the middle of gravity for the world’s innovators. Thirty-eight of this 12 months’s Future 50 are U.S.-based. The nation’s giant, growth-hungry enterprise and public capital markets play a serious position in attracting formidable and succesful founders from world wide.
One other issue on this dominance: Our evaluation exhibits that U.S. corporations typically take main positions in industries which might be themselves fast-growing and extremely modern, like media, finance, semiconductors, and medtech. The U.S.’s mushy touchdown post-COVID has additionally helped: Whereas the U.Okay. and lots of of Europe’s largest economies have stagnated, and development in China is slowing, the U.S. economic system has continued to energy forward.
In contrast with the U.S., European enterprise funding lags in all levels. Regardless of this and different headwinds, Europe’s presence on the Future 50 has risen barely, with 5 corporations, up from two in 2023, together with software program companies leaning into AI: autonomous-driving participant Wayve (No. 44) and BioNTech (No. 50), a biotechnology firm aiming to treatment most cancers.
China’s share in our Future 50 checklist has fallen sharply. This partly displays the truth that China’s innovation ecosystem has stalled lately, amid broader financial challenges, tight authorities management of the tech sector, stricter financing phrases, and lowered U.S. funding. It additionally displays China’s financial mannequin of innovation, which depends closely on public R&D investments—which in flip typically go to universities or bigger “nationwide champion” corporations.
That mentioned, there’s a scene of promising Chinese language gen-AI upstarts like Moonshot AI and 01.AI that didn’t make our prime 50 however have begun to dominate world open-source rankings for LLMs. And China continues to guide in industries of declared nationwide significance, together with automotive, batteries, and renewable vitality.
The 2024 Future 50 exhibits that speedy development and substantial worth creation are achievable—even in risky instances. Notably, 12 of this 12 months’s corporations are below a decade previous. But solely a handful of nations foster the circumstances wanted for such corporations to scale, and even these foundations are susceptible to financial and geopolitical pressures. Supporting the success of corporations with transformative potential and nurturing successive generations are a shared duty for us all—whether or not as founders, workers, traders, or policymakers
Ketil Gjerstad is a managing director and senior accomplice at BCG and world chief of BCG’s technique enterprise. Johann Harnoss is a accomplice and affiliate director at BCG and a fellow on the BCG Henderson Institute. Viacheslav Romanov, Marley Finley, Gabe Bouslov, and Mar Martin contributed to the analysis.
This text seems within the December 2024/January 2025 version of Fortune.
