The Corporate Knights Global 100 is an annual assessment of the world’s most sustainable companies. A sector-based evaluation of the 2026 Global 100 companies shows that these sustainable business models outperform their contemporaries even in standard financial metrics.
The Global 100 (G100) has highlighted leading sustainable corporations across sectors since 2005. Recently, we shifted from evaluating traditional ESG metrics toward measuring companies’ efforts to deliver the products and services needed for the sustainability transition. We compared the performance of ranked companies to their sector peers, using five common metrics of financial performance: Gross income growth 2022-2024, Operating income growth 2022-2024, net income growth 2022-2024, Total revenue CAGR 2021-2024 and Market cap growth in 2025. Despite sustainability policy setbacks and geopolitical pressures in recent years, a majority of G100 companies surpass the median in all metrics.
The relative outperformance of G100 companies falls in a similar range across all metrics. The strongest performance is seen in 66 companies beating the median in Operating income growth 2022-2024, closely followed by 63 companies doing so in Total revenue CAGR 2021-2024. These results are testament to the commercial viability of products that promote a low-carbon economy. The fact that 58 companies have higher than median market cap growth in their sector in 2025 indicates that sustainable business can continue to be an important investment theme.
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