Fortune 500 India: The $2-trillion Milky Way

ESCAPE VELOCITY is the minimum speed an object must reach to break free from the Earth’s gravitational pull without further propulsion. Post 2020, India Inc. appears to have found its version of thrust. After years of building momentum, shedding weight, and strengthening its engines, the corporate sector has finally found its gravity-defying rhythm on the back of scale, profitability, capital, and competitiveness alignment. Every single year since 2021, the cumulative revenues of the Fortune 500 India have been hitting new highs; from ₹88 lakh crore, the most prized cohort of India Inc. has seen its cumulative total income touch nearly ₹172 lakh crore, breaking into the $2-trillion club. The achievement in dollar terms is impressive considering that since the listing exercise began in 2010, the rupee has lost ground to the dollar from 44.90 to 85.55 by the end of March 2025. What’s pertinent to note is that the thrust of India Inc.’s escape-velocity years has come from a handful of heavy industries such as energy, auto, and metals. Oil & gas, with just 11 companies, delivered more than ₹32.37 lakh crore revenue in FY25, reinforcing its status as the Fortune 500 India’s lynchpin. Banks, the second major pillar, expanded even faster: 41 lenders pushed their combined top line from ₹26.53 lakh crore in FY24 to over ₹30.24 lakh crore in FY25, a reflection of both systemic balance-sheet repair and the resurgence of credit demand. The auto sector continued to provide impetus, growing from ₹11.38 lakh crore to ₹12.07 lakh crore, while metals and insurance, long seen as cyclical or slow-moving, posted steady gains as well. These sectors have structurally strengthened over the past decade, adding critical mass to their contribution. State Bank of India, ranked fourth this year, is today one-fifth of India’s GDP with a balance sheet size of ₹73 lakh crore as of FY25. The bank, which has doubled its balance sheet once already since 2018, wants to double it again: this time in six to seven years. “JP Morgan’s balance sheet is about 13% of the U.S. economy; ours is already over 20% of India’s GDP. As the Indian economy grows toward $7-8 trillion, hopefully SBI’s asset size at 25% of GDP will place us if not in the Top 10 but in the Top 20 global banks by assets for sure,” chairman C.S. Setty tells Fortune India. Even as the Fortune 500 India constituents are ambitious and want to scale new highs, the icing on the cake is the rip-roaring growth in profitability given that the cumulative profit pool has hit an all-time high of ₹15.48 lakh crore. Let this sink in. The profit pool of Fortune 500 India in 2025 has hit a 14-year high of 4.7% as a percentage of the country’s GDP of ₹330.7 lakh crore, with revenues firmly making up for over 51% of the GDP. The previous record high was 5.4%, seen in 2011. Effectively, the country’s largest companies are now generating almost ₹1,962 crore of revenue every hour and ₹176 crore of profit an hour, a pace that translates into ₹32.7 crore in revenue every minute and nearly ₹3 crore in profit every minute, a rhythm once unimaginable for India Inc. For instance, Larsen & Toubro’s consolidated revenue crossed ₹2.5 lakh crore, while net profit rose to ₹15,037 crore, doubling from FY18. S.N. Subrahmanyan, who has changed the contours of L&T since taking over as MD in 2017 and as the CMD in 2023, says, “Our services businesses now contribute nearly 25% of total turnover and almost 30% of the profit. If they reach 30-35% of revenues, they could contribute 45-50% of total profits.” Automobiles, yet another bulwark of the India Growth Story, remains resilient as ever and is now looking to conquer international markets. For instance, Maruti Suzuki, the country’s largest small car maker, makes up for 43% of the country’s total exports in FY25, with its Top 5 markets of South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Japan, and Mexico. Exports have played a huge role in bolstering Maruti’s net sales, from ₹75,660 crore in FY20 to about ₹1,52,913 crore in FY25. Its profit after tax has also risen, from ₹5,676 crore in FY20 to ₹14,500 crore in FY25. “It makes much more sense for them [smaller countries] to import vehicles, since their requirements are not like those in India, which sells millions of cars a year. Moreover, economies of scale require large-scale production,” explains chairman R.C. Bhargava. Motilal Oswal expects Maruti Suzuki to deliver a 17.5% earnings CAGR between FY25 and FY28, driven by new launches and robust exports. So, why does the Fortune 500 India universe continue to scale? And, more importantly, what does this say about the new architecture of Indian corporate capitalism? Raamdeo Agrawal, co-founder of Motilal Oswal Financial Services and one of the sharpest observers of corporate India’s long cycles, believes it is par for the course, as in his view, what’s unfolding today is precisely how it was always meant to unfold. For instance, Agrawal mentions that 15-20 years ago, even ₹1 lakh crore of total corporate profit was considered massive. Back then, India’s market cap carried a modest price-to-earnings multiple of 15-20x, meaning that profitability had to align with roughly 5% of the market cap for the system to remain in balance. But today, with India’s listed market cap soaring and the economy expanding, achieving ₹15 lakh crore in profits is not merely a number. “It is a reflection of the economy’s rising corporate density, a broadening of formalised enterprise, and the emergence of entirely new business models,” says Agrawal. And yet, the more remarkable metric is profitability relative to the size of the nation. As Agrawal puts it: “The broader trend in India is that corporate profit-to-GDP stays around 5%. That story has been very stable. And if anything, what will push it higher is the inflow of equity capital.” Between 2020 and 2025, even as revenue surged and profits grew 4x, behind the numbers lies something more fundamental. The pandemic forced a kind of balance-sheet reckoning that Indian corporates had postponed for nearly a decade. Stressed assets were cleaned out. Debt was retired. Inefficient capacity was shut down. Technology went from optional to existential. Entire industries consolidated. Costs shrank. Operating leverage expanded. And suddenly, Indian corporates have turned into disciplined and financially savvy entities. Agrawal sees the shift as almost tectonic: “Structurally, India’s trajectory has changed. Completely changed. We got political independence in 1947, but we got financial independence only five years ago, post-Covid.” Financial independence, he explains, came from the explosion of retail demat accounts, the democratisation of equity flows, and an investment ecosystem flush with domestic capital. Earlier, even a great founder team struggled to raise even ₹1 crore. Today, a promising idea with a credible team can raise ₹100 crore overnight. THE ENDURING CORE Amid all the churn, the creative destruction, and the dizzying entry and exit of companies from the Fortune 500 India universe, there is one solid statistic that stands out: a cohort of 212 companies that have remained on the list every single year from 2010 to 2025. This group is not merely a survivor’s club; it is the gravitational centre of corporate India. And their numbers tell a story far more dramatic than mere persistence. In 2010, these 212 companies generated ₹26.7 lakh crore in revenue and ₹2.7 lakh crore in profit, a respectable base, but hardly exceptional in global terms. But across the next 15 years, as the economy expanded, as new-age firms exploded and old-economy giants retooled, this constant cohort kept compounding relentlessly. By 2015, they had nearly doubled revenues to ₹51.8 lakh crore and lifted profits to ₹3.3 lakh crore. Despite a global pandemic, by 2020, top line was ₹70.5 lakh crore, even though profits had plummeted to ₹2.7 lakh crore. Then came the inflection. In the post-Covid corporate renaissance, their performance accelerated with a velocity that even India’s most bullish analysts hadn’t seen coming. Agrawal terms them as the “core” with the likes of Reliance, L&T, SBI, telecom giants, financial institutions, all companies with entrenched strengths. For instance, L&T is now making its mark in precision engineering by aggressively pursuing large defence orders such as the K9 Vajra, close-in weapon systems, and high-power radars. “In defence, there is a big scope, but we need more policy support,” says Subrahmanyan. Around this ‘core’, however, a new set of companies will emerge. “What will happen is that around the core, new digital companies will keep coming in. On top of that core, you now have companies such as Groww, Lenskart, Zomato, PB Fintech and the like. And some older companies will also enter the list as they scale,” explains Agrawal. What’s impressive about the core is that on a five-year CAGR basis, revenue compounded 11.8%, but profits zoomed 35.1%! As old-world companies reinvent themselves, new sectors such as solar, lab-grown diamonds, oncology hospitals, quick-commerce, and wealth-tech will be at the forefront of change. New-age companies such as Eternal (Zomato) are expected to be the ones to watch out for in the coming years. “With a healthy dose of innovation, ambition, and risk-taking, Eternal is transforming consumption, and we believe it is just getting started, with potential to serve a $50 billion profit pool by FY35,” says Aditya Soman, an analyst who tracks the consumer industry at CLSA India. That perspective comes from one of the country’s oldest foreign brokerage and research houses that today covers 179 stocks in India with a combined market cap of $3.1 trillion, way higher than the $200 billion value of the entire market back in 1998 when it first entered the country. What is also clear is that the recent surge of equity inflows, roughly `8-10 lakh crore over the past few years, is not merely serving as fresh capital, but as a structural reconditioning agent for India Inc. “We were approached by a firm with ₹850 crore of debt and ₹800 crore of equity, which wants to raise ₹1,200 crore in equity. By deleveraging, earnings will expand as interest costs will dissipate,” explains Agrawal. India’s growth narrative in the coming years could well be about unicorns, valuations, and digital disruptors. But the real story of resilience, momentum, and scale is about the 212 companies that refused to fall, survived 15 years of turbulence, and that today account for a majority of the revenue, profit, and economic gravity of India Inc. As the next decade unfolds with new sectors rising, domestic capital deepening, the role of these constants will only grow. They are the quiet giants shouldering the weight of the two-trillion universe. While the jury is still out on how soon the profit to GDP ratio will hit a new high, Agrawal believes it will go to 6-7%, even 8% over the next decade, driven partly by the core constants and partly by the new-age giants who must eventually convert valuation into earnings.

Fortune 500 India: The $2-trillion Milky Way

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