What India's stock market is made of: 4,300 companies, sorted
Every main-board company on NSE and BSE, sorted by sector, size, age, state and profit
About 4,300 companies are listed on the main boards of NSE and BSE. A few hundred of them make up almost all of the market's value. The typical company is 36 years old, and a third are registered in Maharashtra.
People usually mean the Nifty or the Sensex when they say “the stock market”. These are made up of a few dozen famous companies. But about 4,300 companies are listed on the main boards of the NSE and BSE, not counting the separate SME platforms.1 Together they were worth about ₹475 lakh crore in September 2026.
A company is listed when people can buy and sell its shares on a stock exchange. SME platforms are separate parts of the exchanges for small and medium-sized companies.
For almost every main-board company, I looked up its official sector and industry, its market value and when it was incorporated. Market value is what all of a company’s shares are worth together. Incorporated means officially registered as a company.
Where they are listed
| Listed on | Companies | Share of market value |
|---|---|---|
| Both NSE and BSE | 2,453 | 98.6% |
| BSE only | 1,710 | 1.4% |
| NSE only | 132 | not available |
Almost all the value is in companies listed on both exchanges. The 1,710 companies listed only on BSE are mostly tiny. The typical one is worth about ₹33 crore, compared with ₹1,870 crore for the typical company listed on both.
The 12 baskets
The exchanges sort every company into 12 broad sectors. Each sector is a basket of similar businesses. The table shows how the companies, and their value, split across the sectors.
| Sector | Companies | Share of companies | Share of value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer discretionary | 1,046 | 25.2% | 17.2% |
| Industrials | 705 | 17.0% | 12.0% |
| Financial services | 634 | 15.2% | 24.5% |
| Commodities | 462 | 11.1% | 10.1% |
| Services | 383 | 9.2% | 2.6% |
| FMCG | 313 | 7.5% | 5.5% |
| Healthcare | 253 | 6.1% | 7.7% |
| Information technology | 211 | 5.1% | 5.8% |
| Utilities | 55 | 1.3% | 4.2% |
| Energy | 52 | 1.3% | 6.7% |
| Telecom | 31 | 0.7% | 3.5% |
| Diversified | 13 | 0.3% | 0.2% |
The less obvious sectors include these kinds of business:
- Consumer discretionary: textiles, cars and auto parts, appliances, real estate, hotels, retail and media.
- Industrials: capital goods (machines and tools for making other goods), engineering and construction.
- Commodities: chemicals, metals and mining, cement and paper.
- Services: trading (buying and selling goods), logistics (moving and storing goods) and business services.
- FMCG: short for fast-moving consumer goods, the everyday things people buy often.
- Utilities: power, gas and water.
- Energy: oil, gas and coal.
One in four listed companies is in the consumer discretionary sector. Consumer discretionary has the most companies of any sector. Its largest group is textiles, with 264 companies. Next are appliances and consumer durables (195), then hotels, retail and other consumer services (174).
Money businesses dominate the value. Financial services are 15% of companies but a quarter of the market’s value. Banks alone make up 11% of it.
A few giants carry energy, power and telecom. These sectors have just 138 companies, about 3% of the total, but they hold 14% of the market’s value.
The market is extremely top-heavy
Main-board companies on NSE and BSE ranked by market value, 24 September 2026.Source: BSE company data; my analysis
The 100 biggest companies hold 57% of the market’s total value. The top 500 hold 90%. At the other end is the smaller half of listed companies, about 2,080 of them. They add up to just 0.3% of the market.
| Company value (₹ crore) | Companies | Share of companies | Share of value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Over 1 lakh | 118 | 2.8% | 61.3% |
| 20,000 to 1 lakh | 255 | 6.1% | 23.9% |
| 5,000 to 20,000 | 471 | 11.3% | 10.3% |
| 1,000 to 5,000 | 694 | 16.7% | 3.5% |
| 500 to 1,000 | 300 | 7.2% | 0.5% |
| 100 to 500 | 819 | 19.7% | 0.4% |
| Under 100 | 1,501 | 36.1% | 0.1% |
More than a third of all listed companies are worth under ₹100 crore each. The typical (median) listed company is worth about ₹296 crore. The median is the one in the middle if you line them all up from smallest to biggest. Just 118 companies are worth more than ₹1 lakh crore each. Together they make up 61% of the market.
The most common businesses
By number, finance companies other than banks come first, with 503. Next come industrial products makers (331), then trading and business services firms (303). After them are textile and clothing makers (264) and chemical companies (217).
By value, the order is completely different. Banks come first, with 11.2% of the market. Then come other finance companies (7.2%), pharma (medicine makers, 6.0%) and software (5.1%). After those are oil refining and marketing (4.5%), power (4.2%) and vehicle makers (4.1%).
How old they are
Age here means the number of years since a company was incorporated. I read the year from each company’s Corporate Identification Number (CIN).2 This official ID number includes the year. The CIN year can be later than the year the business really began.
| Company age | Companies | Share of companies | Share of value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 10 years | 136 | 3.2% | 3.1% |
| 10 to 25 years | 708 | 16.6% | 12.8% |
| 25 to 50 years | 2,721 | 63.9% | 53.5% |
| 50 to 100 years | 617 | 14.5% | 27.4% |
| Over 100 years | 75 | 1.8% | 3.2% |
- The typical listed company was incorporated in 1990, so it is about 36 years old.
- About 1 in 6 (16%) is more than 50 years old.
- 4 in 5 (80%) are more than 25 years old.
- Only 3% were incorporated in the last 10 years.
- Six in ten were incorporated in the 1980s or 1990s.
- 75 companies are more than 100 years old. The oldest, the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, was incorporated in 1863.
Older companies also carry more weight. Those over 50 years old are 16% of all listed companies but 31% of the market’s value.
New arrivals are not young companies
NSE’s main board has 2,585 companies. Of these, 45% joined it in 2020 or later.3 Some were new IPOs, which means they sold shares to the public for the first time. Others were already listed somewhere else, on BSE or on NSE’s SME platform. They moved up to the main board or added an NSE listing.
Either way, they were rarely young. Take the typical company that joined NSE’s main board since 2020. It was incorporated in 1997, and it was about 26 years old when it got there. Three quarters of these newcomers were incorporated before 2010.
Where they are registered
One state dominates. A third of all listed companies (33%) are registered in Maharashtra. They hold 41% of the market’s value. Gujarat (14% of companies) and Delhi (11%) come next. These three states have 58% of listed companies and 65% of the value.2
A company’s state is where its registered office is. That is its official address, which is not always where it does business.
Government-owned companies
Just 86 listed companies, 2% of the total, are owned by the government. They are public sector companies, plus SBI, LIC and the nationalised banks. Together they make up 13.6% of the market’s value. Of the 100 biggest listed companies, 18 are owned by the government.4
Profit and price
About 1 in 5 listed companies reported a loss in their latest earnings.5 I counted this using the standalone earnings per share that BSE shows. That is a company’s own profit or loss for each share, leaving out any other companies it owns.
Investors also pay very different prices for different kinds of profit. The typical healthcare company trades at about 42 times its earnings. The typical energy company trades at about 15 times. This measure is called the price-to-earnings ratio: the share price divided by the earnings per share. The higher it is, the more investors pay for each rupee of profit.
Footnotes
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Company lists from the NSE equity master file (EQUITY_L) and BSE’s list of active equity scrips, downloaded 24 September 2026, matched by ISIN. BSE main-board groups A, B, T, X, XT, Z and ZP are included; SME platforms, ETFs and debt are excluded. Sector and industry come from the exchanges’ common four-level classification, as shown on BSE for each company; market values are as reported by BSE. Sector and value figures cover the 4,158 companies with both (97% of the total); the 132 companies listed only on NSE are not classified here. ↩
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Incorporation year, state and company type come from each company’s Corporate Identification Number (CIN), taken from BSE’s company information service and, for companies BSE had no CIN for, from the Global LEI registry (GLEIF). Found for 4,257 of the 4,295 companies (99%); the main gaps are SBI and the nationalised banks, which were created by Acts of Parliament and have no CIN. The CIN year is when the current legal company was incorporated, which can be later than when the business began. The state is where the company’s registered office is, which is not always where it does business. Maharashtra includes companies registered with the Pune registrar, and Tamil Nadu those with the Coimbatore registrar. Value shares in the age table use the companies with a known year. ↩ ↩2
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Listing dates from the NSE equity master file. NSE started trading in 1994, so NSE listing dates understate how long older companies have been listed. ↩
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Companies whose CIN marks them as government companies, plus SBI, LIC, the nationalised banks and two state financial corporations, which were set up under their own laws. ↩
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Companies with negative earnings per share as shown by BSE (standalone basis) on 24 September 2026. The median price-to-earnings ratios use companies with positive earnings only. ↩