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      <title>Which large US companies grew revenue ten years in a row?</title>
      <dc:creator>StockPearl</dc:creator>
      <pubDate>Sat, 07 Nov 2026 14:35:01 +0000</pubDate>
      <link>https://dev.to/stockpearl/which-large-us-companies-grew-revenue-ten-years-in-a-row-1877</link>
      <guid>https://dev.to/stockpearl/which-large-us-companies-grew-revenue-ten-years-in-a-row-1877</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;A company can finish a decade much bigger than it started and still have several years when revenue went backwards. I wanted to separate those two things: growth over a long period, and growth every single year.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So I took a sourced list of 100 large US companies and checked their annual revenue in SEC EDGAR's free XBRL data. The question sounds simple: how many increased revenue in each of their latest ten fiscal years?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fourteen of the 78 companies with a full ten-year comparison window increased reported revenue every year: 17.9%.&lt;/strong&gt; Of the original 100, I excluded 15 financial businesses and classified seven as having less than ten years of independent public history. All 85 non-financial companies now have an explicit classification; none remains unresolved.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;That denominator matters. A recent listing or spin-off is not a failed growth streak. It simply has not supplied the same length of standalone reporting history.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  The companies that passed
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;These fourteen companies had higher reported revenue in every one of the ten annual comparisons:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;div class="table-wrapper-paragraph"&gt;&lt;table&gt;
&lt;thead&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;th&gt;Company&lt;/th&gt;
&lt;th&gt;Ten-year revenue CAGR&lt;/th&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/thead&gt;
&lt;tbody&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Vertex Pharmaceuticals&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;27.8%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Broadcom&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;25.1%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Palo Alto Networks&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;23.6%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Amazon&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;21.0%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Netflix&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;20.9%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Salesforce&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;20.1%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Alphabet&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;18.3%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Prologis&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;14.9%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Microsoft&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;13.8%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;S&amp;amp;P Global&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;11.2%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Costco&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;9.8%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;McKesson&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;7.8%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Automatic Data Processing&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;6.5%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;Walmart&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;4.0%&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/tbody&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/div&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The spread is what caught my attention. Walmart and Vertex both passed the same consistency test, but their growth rates were nowhere near each other. Walmart's annual revenue rose from $482.130 billion to $713.163 billion across its window. Vertex went from about $1.032 billion to $12.001 billion.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;A yes-or-no streak hides those differences. It does not tell you whether the business grew slowly from a huge base or rapidly from a much smaller one. That is why I have shown the compound annual growth rate alongside the streak rather than ranking companies by the streak alone.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2F6vh43sh3zjmvqseg6fgg.png" class="article-body-image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;img src="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2F6vh43sh3zjmvqseg6fgg.png" alt="Revenue-growth streak distribution" width="800" height="464"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  Very fast growth did not guarantee a perfect record
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;NVIDIA is a useful counterexample. In this extraction, its revenue rose from $5.010 billion in fiscal 2016 to $215.938 billion in fiscal 2026, an annualized increase of about 45.7%. That was substantially faster than any of the fourteen uninterrupted growers.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;But revenue declined from $11.716 billion in fiscal 2019 to $10.918 billion in fiscal 2020. Its current streak is six annual increases, not ten.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Apple also failed the uninterrupted-growth test, despite ending its window much larger. Annual revenue fell in fiscal 2019 and again in fiscal 2023. Its latest three fiscal years showed increases. The distinction matters: “larger after ten years” and “larger every year” are different statements.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;These are not rankings of business quality. A single difficult year can break a streak without settling anything about a company's future. Equally, ten increases do not establish that the next year will be another one.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fdbi43ord5pgxhtuhm9px.png" class="article-body-image-wrapper"&gt;&lt;img src="https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=800%2Cheight=%2Cfit=scale-down%2Cgravity=auto%2Cformat=auto/https%3A%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Farticles%2Fdbi43ord5pgxhtuhm9px.png" alt="Uninterrupted growers and their annualized growth" width="799" height="524"&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  How I counted
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I used the first 100 companies in &lt;a href="https://companiesmarketcap.com/usa/largest-companies-in-the-usa-by-market-cap/" rel="noopener noreferrer"&gt;CompaniesMarketCap's US market-cap ranking&lt;/a&gt;, captured on 7 November 2026. This is a practical third-party universe, not an independently reconstructed index or a historical top-100 cohort.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I matched tickers to SEC identifiers using &lt;a href="https://www.sec.gov/files/company_tickers.json" rel="noopener noreferrer"&gt;the SEC's company ticker file&lt;/a&gt;, then downloaded each company's &lt;a href="https://www.sec.gov/search-filings/edgar-application-programming-interfaces" rel="noopener noreferrer"&gt;Company Facts data&lt;/a&gt;. Requests identified the research contact and ran sequentially, below the SEC's ten-requests-per-second limit.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I kept US-dollar facts from Form 10-K filings with durations between 350 and 380 days, including annual comparative columns. Most are marked FY; I also admitted Q4-labelled facts when the form and duration established that they were annual, not quarterly. Importantly, I grouped observations by actual period-end date, not the API's &lt;code&gt;fy&lt;/code&gt; field: a later filing can report an earlier year's revenue as a comparative figure.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;For each fiscal period end, I preferred the newest-filed annual observation across the company's appropriate total-revenue tags. That lets an older &lt;code&gt;SalesRevenueNet&lt;/code&gt; observation join a later contract-revenue observation without treating a tag rename as missing business history. I did not sum product and service components. Mastercard's gross contract revenue was excluded in favour of net revenue; NextEra used total operating revenue, not contract revenue alone.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I also joined predecessor SEC identifiers for Broadcom, Disney, Marvell and Exxon Mobil. A new holding company is not a new operating history. Deere had duplicated fiscal ends a few days apart; I consolidated those annual observations rather than inventing extra years. Its week-based year ends were not a missing year.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Ten annual increases require &lt;strong&gt;eleven revenue observations&lt;/strong&gt;: a starting year and ten comparisons. Each eligible company therefore has its own latest eleven-observation fiscal window. Most end in calendar 2025; some end in fiscal 2026. CAGR is the last revenue divided by the first, raised to one tenth, minus one. Equal revenue breaks a streak.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h2&gt;
  
  
  What I checked, and what remains uncertain
&lt;/h2&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I checked three latest annual figures against the original 10-K documents: Apple's fiscal 2026 net sales of $478.834 billion, Microsoft's fiscal 2026 revenue of $331.839 billion, and Amazon's calendar 2025 net sales of $716.924 billion. All three matched the extracted figures. This validates those particular observations, not every number in the dataset.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The seven short-history cases are Palantir, CrowdStrike, AppLovin, Uber, GE Vernova, Sandisk and SpaceX. For spin-offs, the classification refers to the current independent company, not the age of the underlying business. Pre-listing comparatives are retained in the audit file but do not manufacture a decade of standalone public history.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I excluded banks, insurers, brokers and asset managers, including mixed financial groups. Their interest income, premiums, investment gains and other revenue measures need a separate study. Payment networks and financial-information providers remained in the sample.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;These are reported dollars, not organic or inflation-adjusted sales. Acquisitions, divestitures and accounting changes affect the series; newest-filed figures do not create a fully harmonized decade. Broadcom's history, for example, includes its Avago predecessor and substantial acquisitions. Today's largest companies also introduce selection bias. This is a measurement exercise, not investment advice.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I'm building StockPearl, a free, chart-first US fundamentals site using SEC EDGAR data; the beta is coming soon and the waitlist is at &lt;a href="https://stockpearl.com" rel="noopener noreferrer"&gt;stockpearl.com&lt;/a&gt;. This small exercise is a reminder of why I want the underlying history visible: a strong endpoint can hide a very uneven path.&lt;/p&gt;

</description>
      <category>datascience</category>
      <category>finance</category>
      <category>investing</category>
      <category>python</category>
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