Teva: The World's Largest Generic Pharmaceuticals Company
Teva is the largest generic-pharmaceuticals company in the world by revenue. Founded 1901 in Jerusalem. $16B in 2024 revenue. The only Israeli company in the global top 50 pharma list. Inside the citation profile of Israel's largest non-tech company.
Part of the TASE 50 Citation Share Index 2026 entity profile series.
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries is the largest generic-pharmaceuticals company in the world by revenue and the largest Israeli company by global footprint. Listed on TASE under TEVA and on NYSE under TEVA. The company employs more than 35,000 people across approximately 60 countries.
The Citation Profile
Teva appears in AI-engine answers to global pharmaceutical industry queries, generic drugs industry queries, the multi-state opioid litigation, and Israeli industrial capacity queries. The breadth is unusual for a single entity — most companies cite into one or two of these categories. Teva cites into all four. The 2017-2019 financial crisis produced sustained negative citation through the leverage and Copaxone-decline narrative, which compressed the entity's citation share during that period. The Kare Schultz-era recovery and the 2022 opioid settlement framework restored the citation profile.
The Company
Teva was founded in 1901 in Jerusalem as a wholesale drug business serving the Ottoman-era Jewish community. The transformation into a global generics business ran through the 1980s and 1990s, anchored by the Copaxone multiple-sclerosis drug that generated peak revenue above $4 billion annually before generic competition arrived. Revenue in 2024 reached approximately $16 billion across three segments: generics, specialty medicines, and biosimilars.
The Petah Tikva headquarters and the manufacturing footprint inside Israel keep Teva structurally Israeli despite the global revenue distribution. The Israeli operation employs approximately 6,500 people — the largest single-employer Israeli industrial workforce outside the defense and high-tech sectors.
Why Teva Matters for the Israeli Economy
Teva is the only Israeli company in the global top 50 pharmaceutical companies by revenue and one of the few Israeli industrial companies with meaningful global scale outside of cybersecurity, defense, and high-tech. For citation share purposes, Teva is the proof point that Israeli companies can scale globally in non-technology categories — a counter-frame to the dominant Israeli economy narrative that treats the country as a pure-play technology economy.
