Ma Yu Ching's Bucket Chicken House in the oldest in China. Never would have expected a chicken place to top the list!
The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
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Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#12It's amusing to consider the common wisdom that restaurants are a tough, low margin business yet make up so many of the eldest companies. Even if you exceed some threshold to make it to maturity, you'd think the statistics on survival would catch up with you eventually.
It seems like restaurants/bars make it to a certain age where they become part of the fabric of a city/town. They turn into those places where "you just gotta go once or twice a year" and anytime someone comes in from out of town you take them or tell them to go. If I had to guess it's around 25 years. If my parents took me there when I was a kid, the restaurant makes it on that list. If my grandparents took my paren…
Such restaurants still usually end up going out of business. For example, a lot of the fried seafood warhorses in Boston are gone at this point.
Still, if you talk about entire countries, there are often going to be some institutions that have at least some sort of vague claim to continuous operation/ownership.
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#13Interesting elements to me: - The prevalence of drinking and dining establishments amongst oldest-national businesses. - And banks / mints / financial institutions. - The relative youth of oldest-national-businesses in Africa. Most notably Equatorial Guinea with Guinea Equatorial Airlines, the country's oldest business corporation, founded in 1996. This suggests either a data artefact in which older going concerns ar…
> an extreme level of institutional instability.
My first guess would be colonialism and its consequences.
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#14Not flippant question, but what is considered as a business?
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#15I think that the crown of the oldest running business should go to the Roman Catholic Church, which was formally created in 325 AD, but in practice is a couple of centuries older. It is also the first transnational corporation in history.
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#16Interesting elements to me: - The prevalence of drinking and dining establishments amongst oldest-national businesses. - And banks / mints / financial institutions. - The relative youth of oldest-national-businesses in Africa. Most notably Equatorial Guinea with Guinea Equatorial Airlines, the country's oldest business corporation, founded in 1996. This suggests either a data artefact in which older going concerns ar…
> an extreme level of institutional instability. My first guess would be colonialism and its consequences.
Also, the pre-colonial population maybe didn't have a culture of setting up long running businesses? Sure there would be family businesses, but they're be informal affairs. Also, in some cases there was no system of writing so no reliable records for determining the age of a business.
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#17I think that the crown of the oldest running business should go to the Roman Catholic Church, which was formally created in 325 AD, but in practice is a couple of centuries older. It is also the first transnational corporation in history.
Longest running CEO, too.
I always thought of the Pope as "COO, Earth Division."
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#18Not flippant question, but what is considered as a business?
That's a good question, because "Casa da moeda do Brasil" is the "company" that actually prints the real money in Brazil. It's controlled by the state since forever (although the definition of 'state' changed wildly in the last 500 years, between colony, empire, dictatorship, republic, etc).
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#19I think that the crown of the oldest running business should go to the Roman Catholic Church, which was formally created in 325 AD, but in practice is a couple of centuries older. It is also the first transnational corporation in history.
Nitpicking here, but Rome was a backwater for a long time. That business evidently bootstrapped in the Middle East and is continued today as the Orthodox Church.
Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
#20It's amusing to consider the common wisdom that restaurants are a tough, low margin business yet make up so many of the eldest companies. Even if you exceed some threshold to make it to maturity, you'd think the statistics on survival would catch up with you eventually.
A necessary condition for this ranking is that the business' offering was valued from the time it started to the present. Good food and a nice experience is apparently a timeless product category -- although that's far from a sufficient condition to have a long-running and profitable business.