Biggest Big4 clients in Europe (Part-1)

This week we’ll look into the top 100 companies in Europe and their auditors. We utilize the iSTOXX European 100 index to identify the companies. iSTOXX European 100 index provides a blue-chip representation of Europe’s largest companies, combining indices from the Eurozone, the UK and Switzerland that include the largest companies from their respective region in terms of free-float market capitalization.

The breakout of the top100 companies by region is as follows:

Interesting to note that France has a joint audit requirement. Joint Audits were mandated in 1966 to promote a sustainable French audit system. For the interested folks, here is a research paper assessing if two heads are better than one when it comes to audit.

Here is the number of clients and the audit fees big4 gets from these 100 companies:

The joint audits we see on the list above are French companies. Excluding that, PwC audits 28 of the top 100 companies and is a joint auditor for another 9 of them (37%). KPMG comes in next with 25 companies and is a joint auditor for 4 of them (29%). EY and Deloitte is a sole auditor for 16 and 13 companies respectively.

United Kingdom: The breakdown of the 23 top companies in UK is as follows:

France: The breakdown of the 18 top companies in France is as follows:

Look out for Part-2 of this blog post to see the companies from other European Nations.