Alphabet Passed Aramco on 2025 Net Income—a $39.36 Billion Reversal

Alphabet finished 2025 ahead of Saudi Aramco on the companies’ subsequently available annual figures. A Saudi Exchange full-year disclosure lists $92.81 billion in net income attributable to Aramco shareholders, while Alphabet’s audited 2025 income statement shows $132.17 billion, putting Alphabet $39.36 billion ahead.

This changes the current comparison but not the historical record. The profit table published on July 29, 2025 placed Aramco first at $104.98 billion and Alphabet second at $100.12 billion because it used the annual periods available for that edition.

The 50 most profitable companies in the published 2025 ranking

The ranking measures profit in millions of US dollars. It does not order companies by revenue, market capitalization, operating income or profit margin, and its figures generally represent fiscal years completed before the table appeared.

1. Saudi Aramco — $104.98 billion
2. Alphabet — $100.12 billion
3. Apple — $93.74 billion
4. Berkshire Hathaway — $89.00 billion
5. Microsoft — $88.14 billion
6. Nvidia — $72.88 billion
7. Meta Platforms — $62.36 billion
8. Amazon — $59.25 billion
9. JPMorgan Chase — $58.47 billion
10. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China — $50.85 billion
11. China Construction Bank — $46.64 billion
12. Agricultural Bank of China — $39.20 billion
13. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company — $36.09 billion
14. Exxon Mobil — $33.68 billion
15. Bank of China — $33.06 billion
16. Toyota Motor — $31.26 billion
17. Bank of America — $27.13 billion
18. Tencent Holdings — $26.97 billion
19. Samsung Electronics — $24.66 billion
20. HSBC Holdings — $23.98 billion
21. China National Petroleum — $22.42 billion
22. China Merchants Bank — $20.62 billion
23. Visa — $19.74 billion
24. Wells Fargo — $19.72 billion
25. Walmart — $19.44 billion
26. Alibaba Group Holding — $18.03 billion
27. Chevron — $17.66 billion
28. Ping An Insurance — $17.60 billion
29. Verizon Communications — $17.51 billion
30. Merck — $17.12 billion
31. Sberbank — $17.04 billion
32. Fannie Mae — $16.98 billion
33. Comcast — $16.19 billion
34. Shell — $16.09 billion
35. TotalEnergies — $15.76 billion
36. PDD Holdings — $15.63 billion
37. Procter & Gamble — $14.88 billion
38. Home Depot — $14.81 billion
39. China National Offshore Oil — $14.77 billion
40. China Mobile Communications — $14.70 billion
41. Novo Nordisk — $14.64 billion
42. SK Hynix — $14.51 billion
43. UnitedHealth Group — $14.41 billion
44. Goldman Sachs Group — $14.28 billion
45. Johnson & Johnson — $14.07 billion
46. Banco Santander — $13.60 billion
47. Abbott Laboratories — $13.40 billion
48. Morgan Stanley — $13.39 billion
49. Gazprom — $13.13 billion
50. Bank of Communications — $13.01 billion

Why Alphabet moved ahead

Alphabet’s net income rose much faster than its operating income during 2025. The gap matters because it shows that the company’s advance cannot be attributed solely to advertising, subscriptions, cloud computing or other operating businesses.

Other income made a material contribution, led by gains on equity securities, including unrealized gains on non-marketable holdings. Alphabet’s operating businesses remained the foundation of its earnings, but investment-related movements helped enlarge the bottom-line result used in the updated comparison.

Why Aramco moved in the opposite direction

Aramco’s attributable net income declined as lower revenue and other income related to sales outweighed lower operating costs, taxes and zakat. The company’s results therefore moved differently from Alphabet’s even though both remained exceptionally profitable in absolute terms.

Aramco also presented adjusted net income that excludes specified impairments, remeasurement losses and other items. That non-IFRS measure is useful for a different analytical purpose, but it is not interchangeable with net income attributable to shareholders and was not used to calculate Alphabet’s lead.

Technology dominated the summit, but finance occupied more places

Six technology or digital-platform groups filled the published top eight: Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta and Amazon. Their earnings came from different combinations of advertising, devices, software, cloud infrastructure, commerce and semiconductors, so the concentration does not imply that they share one business model or margin structure.

Financial businesses were distributed more broadly through the ranking. JPMorgan Chase led the group, followed by several large Chinese banks, while Bank of America, HSBC, China Merchants Bank and Wells Fargo appeared farther down the table.

Visa, Ping An Insurance and Fannie Mae add another complication to a simple sector count. Payment networks, insurers and housing-finance companies earn money differently from deposit-taking banks, even when all are placed under a broad financial-services label.

Energy had one exceptional leader and a distant second tier

Aramco’s historical figure was more than three times that of Exxon Mobil, the next-highest energy company in the published ranking. China National Petroleum, Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies, China National Offshore Oil and Gazprom formed the remainder of the sector’s top-50 presence.

The subsequent change at the top illustrates how sensitive annual comparisons can be to commodity-linked revenue, fiscal periods and the selected definition of profit. It does not mean that technology displaced energy throughout the table; it means that Alphabet overtook the oil producer that had led the earlier snapshot.

What the reversal does—and does not—establish

Alphabet leads the updated comparison between the original top two, not a fully reconstructed global top 50. Producing a definitive replacement table would require later-period figures for every company, normalized across different fiscal year-ends, reporting currencies and accounting frameworks.

The narrower conclusion is well supported. Aramco led the ranking published in July 2025, while the two companies’ full-year 2025 statements subsequently put Alphabet ahead by $39.36 billion on the stated net-income measures.

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