Munich has the strongest economy of any German city and with the lowest unemployment rate of major German cities it is very prosperous. Seven out of the thirty companies listed in the German blue chip stock market index DAX are headquartered in Munich. This includes luxury car maker BMW, electrical engineering giant Siemens, chip producer Infineon, truck manufacturer MAN, industrial gas specialist Linde, the world's largest insurance company Allianz and the world's largest re-insurer Munich Re.

The Munich region is also a center for aerospace, biotechnology, software and service industries. It is home to the aircraft engine manufacturer MTU Aero Engines, the aerospace and defense giant EADS (headquartered in both Munich and Paris), the injection molding machine manufacturer Krauss-Maffei, the camera and lighting manufacturer Arri, lighting giant Osram, as well as the German and/or European headquarters of many foreign companies like McDonald’s, Microsoft and Intel.

As the largest publishing city in Europe, Munich is home to Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany's largest daily newspapers. Germany's largest public broadcasting network, ARD, its second largest commercial network, ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG, and the Burda publishing group are also located in and around Munich.

Munich is a leading center for science and research with a long list of Nobel Prize laureates from Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1901 to Theodor Hänsch in 2005. It hosts two world-class research universities (Ludwig Maximilian Universität and the Technische Universität München), several colleges and the headquarters as well as research facilities of both the Max-Planck-Society and the Fraunhofer-Society. Both the European navigation system Galileo's control center and the European Space Agency's Columbus Control Center, which is used to control the Columbus research laboratory of the International Space Station, is located at a large research facility of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) 20 km (12 mi) outside of Munich in Oberpfaffenhofen.