When planning for global market growth and sizing up the opportunities in various countries, there is often a lack of data available from various industry sources. One could look at GDP figures or population data by country – both of those have some limitations. A better gauge might be to look at those business entities that generate the most revenue in each country as they will help contribute to other businesses in the geography and in general, raise the level of B2B activity overall.

Diving into the data of the Global 5000 companies – the 5000 largest companies in the world based on revenue – we find a couple of different ways to help guide your estimates of market size and rank order.

The first list is the top 10 countries by number of firms in our Global 5000 database with HQ in the country.

  • USA – 2148
  • Japan – 334
  • China – 221
  • UK – 183
  • Canada – 124
  • Germany – 98
  • France – 84
  • Australia – 77
  • India – 76
  • Italy – 65

For each company in the database, there is an estimate for the amount spent on IT – both internal and external costs. When we take those amounts for each country and look at the average IT spending for these leading firms, we see a different order of countries which would also prove to be attractive targets.

  • France – $902 million per company
  • Germany
  • Netherlands
  • Spain
  • Venezuela
  • Italy
  • China
  • Switzerland
  • South Korea
  • New Zealand – $545 million per company

Of course, all these companies are the biggest of the big and not all companies in that country will spend at that level — but it is indicative of the relative IT spending on a country basis and again shows some of the potential for attractive markets as you eye global opportunities.

Learn more about more the Global 5000 database