Companies · audited annual report
adidas AG’s reported revenues, and why revenue is not worth
adidas AG reported group revenues of €23,683 million for the 2024 financial year in its own annual report: audited, filed, and directly comparable with the prior year. It is one of the cleanest documented figures on this site, and it is routinely misused: revenue is what a company sold, not what it is worth, and the two are conflated constantly in "net worth" writing about companies.
- Group revenues, financial year 2024
- €23,683m
From the group’s own annual report: audited, filed, and comparable year on year. Revenue is not the same thing as what the group is worth, and the page keeps the two apart.
Three different numbers, three different documents
Revenue is the total the company invoiced for goods and services in a period. It appears in the income statement of an audited annual report and is the least ambiguous of the three figures here.
Market capitalisation is the number of shares in issue multiplied by the market price at a moment. It is documented in the sense that both inputs are published, but it is a measure of what the market will pay today, not of anything inside the business, and it moves every second the exchange is open.
Net assets (what a company owns minus what it owes) is in the balance sheet of the same annual report, and it is the figure closest to the everyday meaning of "net worth". It is almost never the figure quoted, because it is usually much smaller and less impressive than either revenue or market capitalisation.
| Figure | What it measures | Where it is documented |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | What the company sold in a period | Income statement, audited annual report |
| Market capitalisation | What the market will pay for the shares now | Shares in issue × current price, both published |
| Net assets (equity) | Assets minus liabilities at the balance-sheet date | Balance sheet, audited annual report |
| “Net worth” of a company | Not a defined term | Nowhere |
Why a filed figure still needs its label
The €23,683 million above is exact and audited, and it is still useless without the word "revenues" attached and the year specified. Strip the label and it becomes a free-floating large number that can be presented as almost anything, which is precisely how company figures end up in net-worth listicles.
This is the general lesson of the companies section. The corporate world produces better documents than any other subject on this site, and the errors around it come almost entirely from mislabelling rather than from invention.
What is filed, and how a reader reaches it
A listed European company publishes an annual report on its own investor-relations pages and files it with the relevant register. That report contains the income statement, the balance sheet, the cash-flow statement and the notes, along with the auditor’s opinion, which is itself worth reading, because it states what was examined and to what standard.
Comparability is the other advantage. Because the format is prescribed, the current year sits beside the prior year in the same table, and the change is stated. Revenue rose from €21,427 million in 2023 to €23,683 million in 2024, a figure the report gives directly rather than leaving a reader to compute.
Questions readers send
What were adidas’s revenues in 2024?
€23,683 million, up from €21,427 million in 2023, as reported in the group’s own audited annual report.
Is that the company’s net worth?
No. Revenue is what the company sold. The closest corporate equivalent of net worth is net assets: assets minus liabilities, which appears on the balance sheet of the same report and is a very different number.
What about market capitalisation?
That is shares in issue multiplied by the current market price. Both inputs are published, but it measures what the market will pay today rather than anything inside the business, and it changes continuously.
If the figure is audited, how do company numbers still get misreported?
By losing their label. Strip the word revenues and the year from €23,683 million and it becomes a free-floating large number that can be presented as almost anything, which is exactly how company figures end up in net-worth listicles. The corporate world produces better documents than any other subject on this site; the errors around it come from mislabelling rather than invention.
Where these figures are published
- 01 adidas AG, Group revenues of €23,683 million for 2024 against €21,427 million for 2023 Annual report 2024, income statement and business performance section
- 02 adidas AG, Net assets, liabilities and the auditor’s opinion for the same period Annual report 2024, balance sheet and audit opinion
Other valuations on file
All of them- Esports company valuations $231m The one esports purchase price a listed buyer disclosed
- McDonald’s $25.9bn Consolidated revenues for 2024, from the Form 10-K
- Pavlok $283,827 Publicly displayed total of the 2014 crowdfunding campaign
- Riot Games $231m What Tencent told shareholders it paid in 2011
- Shark Tank product companies $283,827 A platform-displayed crowdfunding total, the documented kind
- Sportswear group valuations €23.7bn adidas group revenues 2024, from the annual report