An item that caught our attention as we monitor the news of The Global 5000 companies came from HSBC, the UK based banking giant (ranked #38 in The Global 5000). The news item stated that HSBC is planning its biggest European retrenchment in decades. The bank will now be focused on Asia Pac and the Middle East for investment banking and equities businesses.
This got us thinking about how much (if anything) has changed for Global 5000 companies in these regions over the past few years — so, we took dive into the data and the findings surprised us.
We looked at the number of Global 5000 firms and total revenue in each of the major regions – Asia Pac, North America, Europe and then a combined Rest of the World (ROW). We went back to 2019 and then looked at 2023, the last year we had complete revenue figures (2024 data is just starting to be reported now).
First, look at the makeup of the Global 5000 – number of companies in each region – very little change. Slight decline in both Asia Pac and Europe and growth in North America.
We have noted this previously. The big players continue to be the big players by acquisitions, buying up the rising stars which causes a lot of churn among small and mid-sized companies.
A bigger difference shows up when measuring the revenue change. Here we see that the European region’s revenue (shown in $ trillion) had the slowest growth over the years whereas the biggest change was in North America.
The bottom line here is that while HSBC may have business reasons to realign its resources and look for growth outside of where they have been – it does not mean that the Europe region is going away or shrinking dramatically.
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