Africa's Top 250 Companies 2025: The Full List

This year has seen a partial recovery in the value of Africa's biggest companies - but market capitalisations are still a lot lower than they were a decade ago see below for full list.

The fluctuating value of African currencies is partly to blame, as is the retreat of international investors from frontier markets because of uncertainty stemming first from the Covid-19 pandemic, then from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and now the ongoing trade war. As ever, within this overall picture some companies have done a lot better than others.

Africa's 250 biggest companies had a total market capitalisation of 564bn at the end of March 2025, which was a significant increase on the 503bn listed at the same time last year but is still very low by historic standards. A peak of 948bn was achieved in 2015 the overall trend since then has been largely downwards despite the continent's rapidly growing population and undoubted economic potential. This year's figure is even lower than the 597bn recorded in March 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic. There are other reasons, including the delisting of some major multinationals from African exchanges.

The top ten in our 2025 rankings have a very familiar feel to them. Naspers remains the continent's biggest company with a market capitalisation of 40.3bn, up from 31.9bn last year but still well down on the 80.8bn recorded in 2023 and 104.2bn in 2021. The firm's wildly fluctuating market value is largely caused by changes in the fortunes of one of its main assets, its 25 stake in Hong Kong-listed tech and entertainment company Tencent. Naspers operations, which are today relatively limited within South Africa, stretch from technology and venture capital to publishing and multimedia.

Naspers' original 32m investment in Tencent was worth 115bn late last year, in what was perhaps the best deal ever in African corporate history. Fabricio Bloisi, the company's new CEO, is, however, keen to widen the company's interests by identifying the next Tencent that he hopes will double the parent firm's value within ten years. He has pledged to link employee rewards more closely to results and to take more risks.