List availability

• There were only a few references online to a Fortune 5000 list. Other mentions of the list then referred to the Inc 5000 list.
• The Inc 5000 list is focused on the US and isn't publicly available, but can be purchased.
• There is a US-based Fortune 500 list and and a global Fortune 500 list. In 2019, the Fortune Global 500 companies employed 69.3 million people covered 34 countries.
• Forbes provides a list of the Global 2000. It is a ranking of the largest public companies.

Industries

• The main industries in the Inc 5000 are, in order, health, consumer products and services, real estate, construction, education, IT services, government services, advertising and marketing, human resources, business products and services, manufacturing, financial services, retail, insurance, food and beverage, software, telecommunications, logstics and transportation, security
• The Fortune 500 US and global lists are sorted into 56 industries (according to a manual count).
• Those industries are sorted into 21 sectors. Those sectors are: Aerospace and defense, apparel, business services, chemicals, energy, engineering and construction, financials, food and drug stores, food beverage and tobacco, healthcare, household products, industrials, materials, media, motor vehicles and parts, retailing, technology, telecommunications, transportation, wholesalers.
• The Forbes Global 2000 list organizes all the companies into 82 industries (manually counted the industries one can filter by).
• In order to narrow down the Forbes list into just 25 industries, some of them can be combined. For example, apparel/accessories and apparel/footwear could just be one apparel category. Airlines and air couriers could be combined. The various computer categories: hardware, services, and storage could be combined into just the computing industry.
• The top 5 industries in the US by share of GDP are, in order; real estate, professional and business services, state and local government , finance and insurance, and health care and social assistance .