Yet neither its definition nor its perception commands any consensus. This study offers a systematic mapping of the phenomenon, drawing on an original corpus: the annual reports of the world’s 100 largest companies by market capitalization, analyzed using artificial intelligence tools applied to their most strategically significant sections—Risk Factors, Management Discussion & Analysis, and letters to shareholders. The aim is not to measure the geopolitical risk to which these companies are exposed, but to analyze how they formulate it, prioritize it, and integrate it into their governance.

The first finding of this analysis is that geopolitical risk is neither an exogenous variable nor a uniform reality. Its formulation follows a dual geography: that of the registered headquarters, which anchors each company within a specific national, ideological, and regulatory framework; and that of operations, which determines the concrete nature of its vulnerabilities. To understand what a company fears is, first and foremost, to understand where it stands and how it sees the world.

This dual geography reveals four groups:

1. American companies—which alone account for 73% of the total capitalization of the Top 100 in 2025—understand geopolitical risk primarily as a threat to their hegemony and to national security.
2. European companies adopt a normative reading, centered on the erosion of the rule of law, the retreat of multilateralism, and the weakening of regulatory predictability. Caught between Washington and Beijing, they articulate their principal vulnerability around the transatlantic relationship—described simultaneously as irreplaceable and as an increasingly significant source of uncertainty.
3. Chinese companies, for their part, explicitly align their discourse with the priorities of the Party: ideological compliance is a pillar of their risk management in its own right.
4. Indian companies, finally, represent the most singular case: they read the recomposition of the world order as a structural opportunity, a posture made possible by an openly assumed policy of multi-alignment.
5. Aramco, based in Saudi Arabia, stands in a category of its own.

The second finding concerns the variety of forms geopolitical risk takes across sectors. 

In the energy sector, risk bears primarily on traffic infrastructure: pipeline sabotage, disruptions in the Red Sea, blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, expropriations, and windfall surtaxes. Geopolitics strikes directly at assets, operational costs, and price volatility. In the financial sector, risk is tied to lawfare: the extraterritoriality of American sanctions constitutes the principal threat, while international payment systems have become a theatre of confrontation between powers. In the pharmaceutical sector, risk concerns about dependence on Asian active pharmaceutical ingredients are forcing companies to reconsider their supply chains. In the technology sector, risk is fragmentation: the question is no longer whether the global digital ecosystem will split into distinct blocs, but how quickly.

One cross-cutting finding runs through the entire corpus: geopolitical risk absorbs the present, while the climate threat maps out the horizon. Climate risk is acknowledged by virtually all the companies analyzed, yet it is predominantly deferred to medium- and long-term scenarios—2030, 2050, or even 2100. This temporal differentiation is itself a risk: it exposes organizations to severe disruption when climate effects materialize at a pace their models had not anticipated.

To the dual geography that structures risk perception, a third dimension may soon be added: the position occupied by each company within the emerging hierarchy of artificial intelligence. AI is now integrated into annual reports, no longer as a tool but as a strategic infrastructure in its own right. This recomposition will not be neutral—it will follow, and amplify, the fault lines already at work.

A final finding: any reading of these annual reports that confined itself to threats would be incomplete. Several companies have undergone a reversal of perspective worth noting—geopolitical fragmentation is no longer merely a risk to be hedged; it is opening up new markets.