Lvmh: Nestlé, Novo Nordisk, LVMH… Who are the European stock market giants?

(BFM Bourse) – We have compiled a ranking of the 30 largest European stock market capitalizations. France, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are well represented.

The information made the headlines in the major economic and stock market media: the French luxury flagship LVMH recently lost its crown as the largest European capitalization, dethroned by the Danish pharmaceutical group Novo Nordisk.

The number one luxury goods company has suffered from the stock market downturn experienced by its sector in recent weeks. The fault lies with a deteriorating Chinese economy as well as the slowdown reported by several luxury groups in the United States. Novo Nordisk, for its part, benefited from the strong growth of its products against obesity and diabetes, as well as from a clinical trial showing that its Wegovy treatment (anti-obesity) reduced the risk of cardiovascular events by 20%, in comparison with a placebo.

Beyond these two groups, which also have a comfortable lead, what are the largest market capitalizations in Europe?

We have produced a ranking based on those carried out by the site companiesmarketcap.com, which gives the result in the infographic below, where the market capitalizations

are expressed in dollars.

Switzerland and France well represented, not Germany

An important point is that we took Europe in the broad sense, that is to say we added the groups present on the London, Zurich and Oslo Stock Exchange, while the United Kingdom, the Switzerland and Norway are not part of the European Union.

In addition, we have excluded companies that are European but are not listed on a stock exchange in the Old Continent. Which explains the absence of Accenture and Medtronic which can be considered Irish but which are only listed on Wall Street. The IT services and consulting giant Accenture (nearly $200 billion in capitalization) would otherwise have found itself in the top 10.

The same goes for the German specialist in industrial gases Linde, a competitor of Air Liquide, which would have appeared in the top 20. The departure from the DAX, at the start of the year, of this company which was then the largest in the The German index was a hard blow for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Note that LVMH and Novo Nordisk, although they sit on the roof of Europe, remain quite far from the world’s top 10 (the Danish is 17th and the French 18th), the tenth world market capitalization remaining Eli Lilly, an American pharmaceutical company.

France, the United Kingdom and Switzerland share the bulk of the top 20. Switzerland also has the third largest European market capitalization, namely Nestlé, which long held first place before being dislodged by LVMH at the start of 2021 The major pharmaceutical laboratories Roche and Novartis also allow the Swiss country to appear well in this ranking.

France is well placed with six representatives (LVMH, L’Oréal, Dior, Hermès, TotalEnergies, Sanofi) in the top 20, more than any other country, and nine in the top 30. You will note elsewhere the presence of Christian Dior SE, which owns 41.42% of the capital of LVMH and 56.86% of the voting rights. This company (Christian Dior) does not appear in the major French indices such as the CAC 40 or the SBF 120, certainly due to its very low free float since 97.5% of its capital belongs to the holding companies of the Arnault family (At the end December 2022).

Last point: despite the size of the German economy, the largest company on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the professional software publisher SAP, is only in eleventh place.

Note: capitalizations were finalized late Friday afternoon on the companiesmarketcap.com website.

For the flags in our infographic, we could only put one. However, some stocks could have had two, such as Shell (Netherlands/United Kingdom) Unilever (Netherlands/United Kingdom) or even EssilorLuxottica (France/Italy)