The Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) is an industry taxonomy developed in 1999 by MSCI and Standard & Poor's (S&P) for use by the global financial community.
The GICS structure consists of 11 sectors, 25 industry groups, 74 industries and 163 sub-industries[1] into which S&P has categorized all major public companies.
GICS is used as a basis for S&P and MSCI indexes used in the financial field which each company is assigned to a sub-industry, and to an industry, industry group, and sector, by its principal business activity.
"GICS" is a registered trademark of McGraw Hill Financial and MSCI Inc.[2][3] The classification is as follows:[1] Per the MSCI World index, Information Technology is the biggest sector, with 22% of world capitalisation.
The classification standard is regularly updated by S&P Dow Jones Indices and MSCI.