41–50 of 163 posts
I 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.
It'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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Guinea Equatorial Airlines, the country's oldest business corporation, founded in 1996. The number looks more like 1962 to me (maybe they changed it). The actual youngest seems to be South Sudan's Ivory Bank, which was only founded in 1994. This is easily explained by the country being relatively new.
It's distinctly 1996 here: https://businessfinancing.co.uk/the-oldest-company-in-almost...
1996 seems to be the correct date: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_Ecuatorial_Airlines
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> the pre-colonial population maybe didn't have a culture of setting up long running businesses This assumption of an entire continent as having a single culture is something that I find cringy at best.
I 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you clarify on which orthodox church? Greek, Russian and Ethiopian all come to mind, but I'm not aware of a general middle eastern one (genuinely curious). Perhaps it wasn't called orthodox back then (prior to 300AD)?
Oriental Orthodox Churches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_Orthodox_Churches Are probably the most "Middle Eastern", but apparently they, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Catholicism were all the same church until various splits happened, so I'm not sure if you can say any of them are "older".
I 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.
At that point why not count the British Empire as a business?
I 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.
At that point why not count the British Empire as a business?