Serbia’s largest companies in 2025 show a corporate economy still anchored by energy, fuels and mining, but the internal balance has changed sharply. Elektroprivreda Srbije remains the country’s largest company by operating revenue, NIS moved from profit to loss under the combined pressure of sanctions, lower oil prices and weaker sales, while the two Zijin companies in Bor turned copper, gold and export exposure into Serbia’s strongest large-company profit story. The ranking is less a simple list of big firms than a map of where Serbia’s corporate cash flow is now being generated: regulated electricity, oil-sector geopolitics, Chinese-owned mining exports and state gas-sector restructuring.
EPS is likely to retain first place in the next “Top 100” corporate ranking after raising operating revenue to about 460.5 billion dinars in 2025, compared with 444.7 billion dinars a year earlier. The increase was not explosive, but it was strategically important because it confirms that EPS has moved beyond the emergency phase of the previous energy crisis and is again converting domestic electricity sales into a stronger income base. Part of the increase came from the regulated electricity price adjustment that took effect from 1 October 2025, with the average price on guaranteed supply rising by 8.5% in aggregate. Within that, 1.9 percentage points came from the changed threshold between tariff zones, while 6.6 percentage points reflected higher transmission and distribution access costs. EPS recorded an average guaranteed-supply electricity price of 10.579 dinars/kWh, up from 10.310 dinars/kWh in 2024.
The more telling part of the EPS result is the quality of revenue. Foreign-market sales almost halved, from about 6.3 billion dinars to 3.3 billion dinars, meaning the company’s revenue base became even more dependent on domestic electricity billing. Yet EPS still closed the year with net profit of about 38.7 billion dinars, close to 60% higher than in 2024. For investors and creditors, this is a mixed signal: EPS is financially stronger than a year earlier, but the improvement is tied to regulated domestic pricing, tariff architecture and cost pass-through rather than export-led growth.
NIS moved in the opposite direction. Operating revenue fell to 266.2 billion dinars in 2025, down from 386.9 billion dinars in 2024, a contraction of almost one third. Domestic sales of goods dropped from 73.4 billion dinars to 17.7 billion dinars, while sales of products on the Serbian market declined from roughly 263 billion dinars to 216 billion dinars. Foreign-market inflows also weakened, falling from around 51 billion dinars to 36 billion dinars. The result was a net loss of 12.2 billion dinars, compared with profit of 18.3 billion dinars the previous year.
The NIS numbers are not just an oil-company story. They show how quickly geopolitical risk can move from ownership structure into the income statement. The average oil price in 2025 was reported at $69.11 per barrel, about 14% lower than in 2024, while the company also faced the business uncertainty created by US sanctions pressure linked to Russian ownership. For Serbia, NIS remains strategically important because of refining, fuel-market stability and fiscal flows, but the company’s 2025 result shows that strategic importance does not automatically protect profitability when sanctions, price controls and commodity-cycle pressure converge.
The strongest profit story came from mining. Serbia Zijin Copper increased operating revenue to 227.2 billion dinars, up from 205.2 billion dinars in 2024, while net profit doubled to about 61.7 billion dinars. Its revenue was driven by copper cathodes, gold, silver and copper concentrate, with product sales including 173.4 billion dinars from copper cathodes, 48.3 billion dinars from gold, 4.6 billion dinars from silver and 1.2 billion dinars from other products. Export sales reached about 163 billion dinars, while domestic sales stood at around 64 billion dinars.
The sister company, Serbia Zijin Mining, delivered an even more powerful profit signal. Operating revenue rose to about 213.8 billion dinars, from 180.9 billion dinars in 2024, while nearly all revenue came from foreign-market sales, at around 210 billion dinars. Net profit reached 133.2 billion dinars, around 50 billion dinars higher than the previous year and the largest profit among the five major companies covered. That puts Zijin Mining in a different category from Serbia’s traditional large enterprises: it is not merely large by revenue, but highly profitable because it is tied directly to exportable mineral output, copper-gold concentrate contracts and global metals demand.
Srbijagas presents a separate signal. Operating revenue fell to 143.8 billion dinars, down from 181.9 billion dinars in 2024, pushing the company lower in the ranking. The main difference was not a collapse in domestic sales, which still reached almost 137 billion dinars, but the absence of budget donations and subsidies that had amounted to around 43 billion dinars in 2024. Despite this, Srbijagas ended 2025 with net profit of about 9.7 billion dinars, around 1.4 billion dinars higher than the previous year.
The broader corporate context matters. Serbia’s economy recorded aggregate net profit of about 957.6 billion dinars in 2025, up 10.9% year on year, while total corporate revenues reached 21,112 billion dinars and expenses 19,930 billion dinars. More than 67,000 companies were profitable, but more than 32,000 still reported losses, showing that headline profitability remains unevenly distributed. The “Top 100” picture is therefore highly concentrated: a small group of energy, mining and infrastructure-linked companies carries a disproportionate share of Serbia’s corporate revenue and profit visibility.
The essential shift in 2025 is that revenue leadership and profit leadership are no longer the same thing. EPS remains the revenue anchor, NIS shows the vulnerability of geopolitically exposed fuel assets, Srbijagas demonstrates how subsidy withdrawal changes corporate optics, and Zijin Copper and Zijin Mining show that Serbia’s most powerful profit engine is increasingly tied to metals, exports and mine-to-market integration. Serbia’s corporate table still begins with electricity, but its profit map is being redrawn in copper, gold and sanction-sensitive energy assets.
