who are the names that move the country’s economy

The size of a company is, ultimately, a matter of perspective. For example, Inditex worth more in the stock market than any other Spanish company, but Repsol far surpasses it if what we look at is its income. On the other hand, Mercadona, without being listed in any index, employs more people in Spain than any large multinational based in the country.

They are three different data that return three business maps that barely overlap, but together they form the business reality of Spain and about how the Spanish economy is built, revealing which sectors generate wealth for investorswhich ones move the most money and which are those companies that really move the employment needle in our country.

The Top 10 companies of the IBEX35

The most common when we talk about large companies is to go to the IBEX35, the Spanish stock ranking which does not measure how much a company invoices or how many people it employs, but rather how much investors trust in your future.

With that criterion, Inditex leads the list with a wide difference. At the end of March 2026, after publishing its annual resultsits stock market value was around 163,500 million euros, although in December 2025 it reached 175,155 million, its historical maximum.

At that time, investment bank Jefferies revised upwards its target price for the share, which would imply a value greater than 200,000 million euros. Inditex’s capitalization advantage over the rest of the companies does not come from your sales volumebut of what the company founded by Amancio Ortega win with every euro you sell.

In its fiscal year of 2025, the textile company obtained a record net profit of 6,220 million, 6% more than the previous year. This explains why large banks, such as Santander, BBVA or CaixaBank and energy companies such as Iberdrola or Endesa, with larger business figures, are left behind on the stock market.

In 2025, by first time in historyfive Spanish companies exceeded 100,000 million euros on the stock market at the same time. Despite this, the index continues to be dominated by banks and electricity companies. However, sectors with a very important presence in the daily lives of Spaniards (such as the food industry, hospitality, automotive) barely have a presence in this index.

Largest companies in Spain by turnover

When the criterion is not investor confidence, but the total income that a company generates, the map turns upside down.

The oil, gas and electricity companies They occupy the first positions because they buy and sell enormous quantities of raw materials, although what they keep as profit is a relatively small part of that figure.

In this case, Repsol is the clearest example. In 2025, the fall in the price of oil, with a barrel of Brent falling 14.5% to $69.1 on average, took its toll. His operating result It fell 12.2%, to 5,312 million euros, although the final net profit rose 8.1%, to 1,899 million. That is, billing is not the same as entering.

The big surprise from the list of companies with the highest turnover in Spain It’s Mercadona. Without being listed on the stock market and with hardly any presence in the financial debate, the Valencian chain founded by Juan Roig closed 2025 with 41,858 million euros in sales (8% more) and a net profit of 1,729 million (25% more). These figures have left Mercadona with 28.5% of market share in food in Spain, six tenths above 2024.

Juan Roig qualified the “historical” exercise. Inditex, on the other hand, despite being the most powerful company in market capitalization, remains in a middle position in the income ranking.

Largest companies in Spain by number of employees

There is a tendency to think that a large company also needs a large workforce, something that large technology companies also insist on denying month and month with their large rounds of layoffs.

In fact, the proof of nine for this theory is that the list of largest companies in Spain for the employment they generate subverts the order again. The company that hires the most people in Spain is neither the largest on the stock market nor the one with the most turnover: it is Santander Bank and all the personnel it employs in the operations management area. More than 198,400 employees, despite the cuts to your workforce of branches.

Mercadona closed 2025 with 110,000 workers between Spain and Portugal and that year raised salaries of its entire workforce 8.5%.

The most striking contrast in the ranking is the one between the extremes with Repsol, which heads the billing list, is located at the bottom of the employment list since its workforce is around 25,000 people thanks to the high level of automation of its activity.

Inditex or ACS need staff five or six times larger than Repsol to function due to the nature of their activity. The difference between selling clothes or build roads and extract oil or distribute electricity, explains why the impact on employment of these companies has nothing to do with their weight on the stock market or income.

The largest companies in Spain by autonomous community

Reading the business map of Spain by autonomous community reveals something that economic or national lists tend to hide: the country’s economy is more decentralized than it seems, and many of the companies that lead the economy or employment in their region are not even listed on the stock market or are those that obtain the most profits.

Mercadona leads the Valencian Community with 41,858 million in sales, while one of your suppliers of sausages, Incarlopsa, dominates Castilla-La Mancha and El Pozo rules in Murcia. None of them appear on the IBEX, but they are companies that move billions, create massive employment in their territories and define local economic activity.

The other pattern that clearly emerges is sectoral concentration by geography.

The automotive industry dominates the center and northeast of the peninsula, with Stellantis in Aragon, Renault leading in Castilla y León with its factory in Palencia, Volkswagen in Navarra and Seat in Catalonia. All of them form an industrial corridor that makes Spain one of the main vehicle manufacturers in Europe.

On the other hand, energy takes over the top positions in Madrid and the Basque Country, with Repsol and Iberdrola respectively, while the queen of textile retail Inditex marks its territory in Galicia.

On the other hand, the food, meat and agri-food sector fills the gaps in the interior, standing out in Murcia, La Rioja, Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura, with leading companies in these sectors that reflect the productive vocation of those territories.

For its part, Airbus appears as the leading company in Andalusia, although in this case it does not do so because of its Sevillian plant, but rather as a representative of an aeronautical ecosystem made up of smaller companies, which makes that community the second aerospace region in Europe.

In the two autonomous cities, Ceuta and Melilla, the leadership is held by local service companies with billings well below the rest, demonstrating the difference in scale between a limited metropolitan economy and the peninsular one.

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Image | Repsol, Wikimedia Commons, Mercadona