Fortune will unveil its annual Fortune 500 Europe list on September 16, ranking the continent's 500 largest companies by revenue, alongside a Fortune CEO Forum in London that will bring together chief executives from across Europe and the Middle East to compare notes on growth, according to Fortune.
The gathering arrives against a backdrop of persistent concern about European growth. Eurozone GDP has averaged just 0.9 percent annual growth since the financial crisis, compared with more than 2 percent in the United States over the same stretch, a gap that has shaped much of the conversation around Europe's competitiveness. Even so, the event's framing leans toward what the region still has going for it, pointing to innovation gains, resilient labor markets, improving consumer confidence, and a base of strong universities and manufacturing capacity that has not gone away even as headline growth lagged.
The executive lineup spans a wide swath of industries. Leaders confirmed include representatives from technology companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Microsoft, automakers Ferrari, Volvo Cars UK, and Volkswagen, energy firms Shell and EDF, banks NatWest and Societe Generale, industrial group Honeywell, and technology services firm Tech Mahindra. Combined, the executives attending represent close to $2 trillion in wealth.
Discussion topics are expected to range across growth strategy and best practice sharing between companies, infrastructure investment, how AI gets delivered at scale inside large organizations, and developments in banking and telecommunications. Former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, whose name has become closely tied to the debate over European competitiveness, argued that the region needs a new stance toward cooperation, working to remove obstacles, harmonize rules, and coordinate policy across countries rather than let fragmentation continue to weigh on growth.
The Fortune 500 Europe list itself will offer a fresh read on which companies are actually driving that growth story, giving the forum's attendees a data backed backdrop for a conversation that has, for years, been dominated by comparisons to the faster growing US economy.