Australia now ranks seventh in the world for the number of publicly listed companies worth more than a billion US dollars.

With 143 such firms in 2025, Australia sits alongside economic giants like Germany and ahead of France and South Korea. On paper, this looks like a cause for quiet national pride. But look closer and this list reveals as much about Australia’s vulnerabilities as it does its strengths.

What we have built is impressive – particularly for a nation of just 26 million. A sophisticated financial sector, resource wealth, strong institutions and a robust regulatory environment have enabled a relatively small country to host a disproportionate share of the world’s corporate heavyweights.

Yet Australia’s billion-dollar companies also expose our narrow economic foundations. The majority cluster in four familiar areas: mining and resources, banking and finance, healthcare, and property-linked industries. These sectors are stable, but static. They reflect a pattern of capital flowing into already safe bets rather than seeding the dynamic and diverse industries of the future.

Take innovation. Australia performs respectably in terms of inputs – education, institutional quality, and infrastructure. But when it comes to outputs like commercialised research, patents, and advanced exports, we fall behind many countries with fewer natural advantages. We are not short of bright ideas, but we are short on patient capital, supportive industrial policy and pathways to scale. The result is that too many promising ventures exit early, go offshore or simply stall.

In the meantime, our economic dynamism rests on a fragile foundation: resource extraction for overseas markets, especially China. With geopolitical tensions rising, and global decarbonisation accelerating, we must ask whether our current billion-dollar champions will be tomorrow’s stranded assets.

The picture is not all bleak. Australia has world-class companies in medtech and agtech. Our proximity to the booming Asia-Pacific, combined with a stable legal and financial system, is a comparative advantage. But potential is not strategy.

What we need now is a deliberate plan to increase the next generation of billion-dollar companies in sectors that match our social and ecological needs – clean energy, circular manufacturing, regenerative agriculture, Indigenous-led enterprises and sovereign tech capabilities.

This requires more than tax tweaks and R&D grants. It demands mission-driven public investment, procurement reform, equity finance that doesn’t just reward incumbents and a reorientation of superannuation capital toward national priorities. It means measuring success not just in company valuations, but in jobs created, emissions reduced, and communities strengthened.

Australia’s economic future should not be left to drift on the back of legacy sectors and market logic alone. The goal is not just more billion-dollar firms – but better ones.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.