Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
You may recognize Cargill, Koch Industries, or Lidl when you think about the world’s biggest private companies. Yet the largest private businesses are not limited to famous consumer brands. Some of the biggest are commodity trading companies whose names rarely appear on store shelves.
Using the latest annual revenue figures publicly reported by the companies, the global picture is led by Vitol, followed by Trafigura, Schwarz Group, Cargill, and Koch. The figures come from different fiscal periods and use slightly different reporting terminology, so the ranking should be read as a revenue-based comparison rather than a perfectly standardized accounting league table.
The 5 Largest Private Companies in the World
| Rank | Company | Latest reported annual revenue |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Vitol | $343 billion |
| 2 | Trafigura | $240.3 billion |
| 3 | Schwarz Group | €185.6 billion, about $209.7 billion |
| 4 | Cargill | $154 billion |
| 5 | Koch | $125 billion+ |
The Schwarz Group figure is converted using the European Central Bank’s 2025 average exchange rate of $1.13 per euro, producing approximately $209.7 billion. The other companies report their figures in U.S. dollars.
There is an important distinction here. Revenue is not the same as profit, company value, or wealth. Commodity traders can post extraordinarily high revenue because they buy and sell enormous quantities of oil, metals, gas, agricultural products, and other raw materials. A supermarket group can also generate huge sales because products pass through thousands of stores every day.
That is why a $300 billion private company is not automatically more profitable or more valuable than a private company with much lower revenue.
1. Vitol
Revenue: $343 billion
Vitol is the largest company on this list by latest reported annual turnover.
The Switzerland-based energy and commodities trader reported $343 billion in turnover for 2025, compared with $331 billion in 2024. The company says it delivered 605 million tonnes of oil equivalent of energy during the year and handled an average of about 8 million barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum products.
Vitol is not a household brand in the way that Lidl, Mars, or Cargill can be. Its business operates much further up the supply chain.
The company buys, transports, stores, refines, finances, and sells energy and other commodities around the world. Its activities include crude oil, refined petroleum products, natural gas, power, shipping, storage, refining and energy infrastructure. Vitol says it operates from more than 40 offices worldwide.
Its relatively small core workforce also shows why revenue alone can be misleading. Vitol reports more than 1,800 employees, giving the company a very different operating model from retail groups that employ hundreds of thousands of people.
Why is Vitol’s revenue so large?
The answer is volume.
Imagine a trader moving huge quantities of oil between producers, refineries, storage facilities, shipping networks and customers. The value of the commodity sold can be counted in billions of dollars even when the trader keeps only a fraction of that amount as profit.
Vitol’s 2025 figures show the scale. It handled approximately 8 million barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum products, operated or had interests across energy infrastructure, and maintained more than $13 billion in long-term assets.
The ownership structure is also different from the standard public-company model. Vitol has historically been employee-owned, with its ownership spread among employees rather than public stock-market investors.
That combination gives Vitol an unusual position: enormous transaction volume, relatively few employees, and a private ownership structure.
2. Trafigura
Revenue: $240.3 billion
Trafigura is another commodity trading giant that most consumers rarely encounter directly.
The Singapore-based group reported $240.3 billion in revenue for its financial year ending September 30, 2025, down slightly from $243.2 billion the year before. Its 2025 underlying EBITDA was $8.2 billion and net profit was $2.7 billion.
Trafigura operates across oil and petroleum products, gas and power, metals and minerals, carbon markets, shipping and related infrastructure. Its business is built around sourcing commodities, storing them, transporting them, processing them and delivering them to customers.
Its 2025 numbers demonstrate the scale of that operation.
Trafigura says its energy division generated approximately $167 billion in revenue, representing 70% of group revenue. Its metals and minerals segment generated another $73.3 billion, or around 30% of total revenue.
The company traded 358 million metric tonnes of oil and petroleum products, natural gas and LNG during the year, equivalent to an average of about 7.6 million barrels per day for its oil and petroleum products activity.
Trafigura’s unusual ownership model
Trafigura is privately owned by its employees. The company says more than 1,400 shareholders own the business, with ownership concentrated among employees and senior people within the group.
That is another reason private-company rankings can look surprising.
A business does not need to have millions of public shareholders to become enormous. Trafigura has grown around a specialized global trading model, with employees participating directly in ownership.
The company averaged 14,476 employees during FY2025, a modest workforce compared with retail giants that may employ hundreds of thousands of people.
The numbers also show why you should not compare Trafigura’s $240.3 billion revenue with the revenue of a manufacturer without understanding what each company sells and how revenue flows through the accounts.
3. Schwarz Group
Revenue: €185.6 billion, approximately $209.7 billion
Schwarz Group is the company behind two of Europe’s best-known grocery chains: Lidl and Kaufland.
Its fiscal 2025 revenue reached €185.6 billion, up 5.8% from €175.4 billion the previous year. Using the ECB’s 2025 average exchange rate of $1.13 per euro, that is approximately $209.7 billion.
That places Schwarz Group above Cargill on a comparable revenue basis.
The group is much more than a supermarket operator. Its ecosystem includes retail, food production, recycling, waste management and digital businesses. The group says it had about 14,500 stores and 604,000 employees during fiscal 2025.
Lidl remains its largest business by store revenue. Lidl generated €140.2 billion in store revenue in fiscal 2025, while Kaufland generated €36.7 billion. Schwarz’s other businesses include PreZero, Schwarz Produktion and Schwarz Digits.
Why Schwarz Group is so large
Grocery retail is a high-volume business.
A single grocery transaction may be relatively small, yet thousands of stores serving millions of customers can produce extraordinary annual sales. Schwarz has built that model across dozens of countries.
Lidl and Kaufland operate across 33 countries, and the group’s retail network continued expanding in fiscal 2025. Schwarz added about 300 stores during the year, bringing the total to roughly 14,500.
The group’s vertically connected structure also matters. Schwarz does not simply buy products from unrelated suppliers and place them on supermarket shelves. It has businesses involved in production, packaging, recycling, digital services and other parts of the supply chain.
That structure helps explain how a company associated in the public mind with Lidl became one of the world’s biggest private corporate groups.
4. Cargill
Revenue: $154 billion
Cargill is probably the most recognizable name on this list among readers in the United States.
The Minnesota-based food and agriculture giant reported $154 billion in revenue for fiscal 2025. Cargill’s annual report says the figure came from its operations across food, agriculture, trading and specialized businesses.
Cargill has more than 155,000 employees, operates in 70 countries, and serves 125 markets, according to its 2025 corporate figures.
Its business touches parts of everyday life that consumers may not associate with the company. Cargill works across agriculture, food ingredients, animal nutrition, commodities trading, supply chains and industrial activities.
The company began in 1865 as a grain storage business and grew into one of the world’s largest privately held agricultural and food companies.
Why Cargill often appears at No. 1
There is a geographic reason.
When you search for the largest private companies in America, Cargill generally sits at the top. Forbes identifies Cargill as America’s largest private company, with $154 billion in 2025 sales. The Cargill and MacMillan families still own roughly 90% of the business.
That U.S.-focused ranking is different from a worldwide ranking.
Vitol and Trafigura are global private companies with much larger reported turnover, and Schwarz Group’s latest euro-denominated revenue also translates to more than Cargill’s $154 billion.
So when someone says “Cargill is the world’s largest private company,” the statement needs context. Cargill is the largest private company in America by the commonly cited revenue ranking, but a global ranking based on the latest reported revenues produces a different result.
5. Koch
Revenue: $125 billion+
Koch occupies a completely different part of the private-company economy.
Headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, Koch is a diversified group operating across manufacturing, agriculture, chemicals, refining, consumer products, electronics, software, healthcare technology, engineering, logistics, real estate, investments and other industries.
Koch says its companies generate more than $125 billion in annual revenue and employ approximately 130,000 people in more than 50 countries.
Unlike a company such as Vitol, which is heavily connected to global commodity trading, Koch’s scale comes from a broad collection of industrial and commercial businesses.
Its portfolio includes companies and operations connected to refining, chemicals, packaging, building materials, electronics, automotive components, agriculture, consumer products, technology and logistics.
A very different private-company strategy
Koch has spent decades building a diversified group rather than concentrating the entire business around one consumer brand.
The company’s private status also allows it to operate without the same quarterly public-market reporting cycle faced by listed corporations. Koch says more than 90% of earnings have historically been reinvested into its businesses and that its companies have invested more than $190 billion in growth and improvements since 2003.
That reinvestment model is one reason private ownership can produce a very different corporate structure from companies whose shares trade every day on a stock exchange.
Why These Companies Can Be So Large Without Being Public
A common misconception is that a company needs to be publicly traded to reach hundreds of billions of dollars in annual sales.
These companies show otherwise.
Private does not mean small
A private company can have:
- Hundreds of thousands of employees
- Operations across dozens of countries
- Billions of dollars in annual investment
- Large factories, stores, ships, warehouses and infrastructure
- Thousands of corporate subsidiaries and business units
- Global commodity supply chains
- Family or employee ownership
Schwarz Group alone reported 604,000 employees in fiscal 2025. Cargill reported more than 155,000. Koch reports about 130,000.
The difference is that their shares are not freely traded on a public stock exchange at the parent-company level.
Why Commodity Traders Dominate the Top of the List
The first two names reveal something interesting about revenue rankings.
Vitol and Trafigura are not selling $343 billion and $240.3 billion worth of finished products directly to ordinary consumers.
Their business involves moving commodities through global supply chains.
Oil may be bought from a producer, transported by ship, stored at a terminal, refined, sold to another company and eventually become fuel used by consumers.
Every step can involve a commercial transaction.
The trader’s revenue can consequently become enormous even when its profit is far smaller than the total value of commodities passing through its business.
Trafigura’s 2025 results illustrate this difference. It reported $240.3 billion in revenue but $2.7 billion in net profit.
That does not make the revenue figure meaningless. It tells you something different.
Revenue measures the scale of business flowing through a company. Profit measures what remains after costs and expenses.
You should never treat the two as interchangeable.
Why Private Company Rankings Are Harder Than Public Company Rankings
Public companies have extensive disclosure requirements, which makes it easier to compare annual revenue, earnings, assets and other measurements.
Private companies have more flexibility around disclosure.
Some voluntarily release detailed financial statements. Others publish only selected figures. Some figures are found through annual reports, credit disclosures, regulatory filings or company statements.
The fiscal periods can also differ.
For example, Trafigura’s FY2025 ended September 30, 2025, whereas the Schwarz Group reports fiscal-year figures based on its own financial calendar.
Then there is currency.
Schwarz reports in euros, while Vitol, Trafigura, Cargill and Koch report their key figures in U.S. dollars. Converting currencies creates a common measurement, but the exchange rate chosen can change the final ranking around close positions. For this comparison, the 2025 ECB annual average of $1.13 per euro is used for Schwarz Group.
That is why a responsible global private-company ranking should always tell you which measurement and reporting period it uses.
Revenue vs. Company Value
The word “largest” causes another common misunderstanding.
A company with the highest revenue is not necessarily the company with the highest valuation.
Consider three different measurements:
Revenue: How much money a business records from its sales and operations.
Profit: How much remains after the business pays its expenses and other costs.
Valuation: What investors or buyers estimate the entire company is worth.
These measurements can produce completely different rankings.
A retailer can generate enormous revenue but operate on relatively thin margins. A technology company can generate far less revenue but command a much larger valuation because investors expect rapid future growth.
Private companies make valuation comparisons harder because there is no continuously traded market price.
That is one reason revenue is a useful basis for identifying the largest private companies when reliable financial figures are available.
Which Countries Have the Biggest Private Companies?
The five companies on this list span several major business centers:
Switzerland: Vitol’s global operations are centered around energy and commodity trading.
Singapore: Trafigura’s group headquarters structure is centered in Singapore, with operations spread around the world.
Germany: Schwarz Group is headquartered in Neckarsulm and operates Lidl, Kaufland and several related businesses.
United States: Cargill is headquartered in Minnesota, while Koch is based in Wichita, Kansas.
This is a useful reminder that the private-company economy is highly global. The biggest private businesses are not concentrated in Silicon Valley or New York.
Some of the world’s largest privately controlled companies are rooted in agriculture, energy, retail and industrial production.
What Happened to Famous Private Companies Such as Mars?
Consumer brands often dominate lists of famous private companies.
Mars is a major example. The company owns brands across confectionery, pet care and food, and it appears near the top of U.S. private-company rankings. The latest U.S. rankings place Mars below Cargill and Koch by annual revenue.
That illustrates another point about these rankings.
A brand can be extraordinarily famous without having the highest revenue among private corporations.
A commodity trader may be almost invisible to ordinary consumers yet generate several times more annual sales than a household-name food company.
The U.S. Ranking Is Different
Readers searching for “largest private companies” often encounter an American ranking first.
The most recent U.S. revenue-based data places these companies near the top:
- Cargill
- Koch
- Publix Super Markets
- Mars
- H-E-B Grocery Company
The published figures are about $154 billion, $125 billion, $59.7 billion, $55 billion and $49.6 billion respectively.
That list is useful, but it should not be presented as a global ranking.
The worldwide list has to account for giant private businesses headquartered outside the United States, especially commodity trading groups and European retail groups.
What Makes These Five Companies Different?
The interesting part is not simply the revenue number. Each company reached enormous scale through a different business model.
Vitol built its scale around global energy and commodities trading.
Trafigura built its business around commodities, logistics, infrastructure and international supply chains.
Schwarz Group built a retail empire around Lidl and Kaufland while adding production, recycling and digital businesses.
Cargill expanded from grain storage into a global agriculture, food and commodities business.
Koch built a broad industrial and commercial group covering dozens of industries.
There is no single formula for creating a giant private company.
Some rely on physical assets. Some rely on trading expertise. Some build huge retail networks. Some grow through family ownership and long-term reinvestment.
The common feature is scale.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the largest private company in the world?
Using the latest reported annual revenue figures, Vitol is the largest company in this comparison, with $343 billion in 2025 turnover. Vitol reported $331 billion for 2024.
Is Cargill the largest private company?
Cargill is the largest private company in the commonly cited U.S. revenue rankings, with $154 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue. A global ranking produces a different result because companies such as Vitol, Trafigura and Schwarz Group are larger by their latest reported revenue figures.
Is Schwarz Group bigger than Cargill?
By reported annual revenue, yes. Schwarz Group generated €185.6 billion in fiscal 2025. Using the ECB’s 2025 average exchange rate, that converts to roughly $209.7 billion, compared with Cargill’s $154 billion.
Is Koch still one of America’s biggest private companies?
Yes. Koch says its businesses generate more than $125 billion in annual revenue and employ about 130,000 people across more than 50 countries.
Are Vitol and Trafigura publicly traded?
No. Vitol has historically operated with employee ownership, while Trafigura states that it is employee-owned, with more than 1,400 shareholders.
Why don’t these companies have exact market values like Apple or Microsoft?
Public companies have continuously traded shares, giving the market a constantly changing market capitalization. Private companies do not have that same daily public price discovery. Their valuations can be estimated from private transactions, financing rounds, acquisitions and other methods, but those figures are not equivalent to a live stock-market valuation.
Is revenue the best way to rank private companies?
Revenue is one of the most transparent measurements available for a global comparison, but it is not a complete measure of corporate size. Profit, assets, employees, valuation and geographic reach can tell very different stories.
The Real Scale of Private Business
The most surprising part of this ranking is not that these companies are private. It is how large private ownership can become without a public stock listing.
Vitol moved $343 billion in annual turnover. Trafigura generated $240.3 billion in revenue. Schwarz Group generated €185.6 billion while employing more than 600,000 people. Cargill generated $154 billion and Koch reported more than $125 billion.
These companies also show why the phrase “private company” should never be confused with “small company.”
A private business can own factories, ships, stores, farms, logistics networks, technology companies, recycling operations and global supply chains, all without having its parent-company shares traded on a public exchange.
The next time you see a list of the world’s largest businesses, check the methodology before accepting the ranking. Revenue, valuation, profit, assets and employees answer different questions. For a global revenue-based comparison, the latest reported figures put Vitol, Trafigura, Schwarz Group, Cargill and Koch among the giants of the private corporate world.
Our data sources:
https://www.cargill.com/sustainability/reporting-hub/annual-report-library
https://gruppe.schwarz/en/press/archive/2026/companies-of-schwarz-group-generate-185.6-billion-euros-in-revenue-and-drive-growth-with-investments-in-excess-of-10-billion-euros
https://legalclarity.org/largest-privately-owned-companies-in-the-world
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/01387437/filing-history
And more.
