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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)

#21

Post by subpixel »

ghaff wrote: post #12
blakesterz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if that correlates to the local and affordable seafood also having disappeared. There's a limit to the number of customers you can attract with calamari and other things formerly considered bait.

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#22

Post by mumblemumble »

yorwba wrote: post #7
dredmorbius wrote: post #4

Interesting 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…

> 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.

Plenty of oldest companies in this map predate the countries they're currently in. The The oldest company in Mexico is apparently about 300 years older than Mexico, and the oldest company in Canada is about 200 years older than Canada.

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#23

Post by TheNewAndy »

I was expecting to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avedis_Zildjian_Company for USA. I suspect there is always some wiggle room in the definitions of "oldest", but wikipedia dates it as earlier than Shirley Plantation (and it is also older than the company given for Armenia).

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#24

Post by cmroanirgo »

kubanczyk wrote: post #19
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #15

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.

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.

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)?

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#25

Post by xtracto »

The "Casa de Moneda de México" year is off by 1 I think (1534), or the Wikipedia entry ( https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_de_Moneda_de_M%C3%A9xico#... ) is wrong (1535).

Interesting trivia tidbit to know that the oldest company in the Americas is actually in Mexico.

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#26

Post by throwaway87lcg6 »

Steltek wrote: post #5

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.

I imagine there's some advantage to fully owning the land the establishment sits on. It's probably much easier to outlast the local competition when a lease isn't eating your margins.

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#27

Post by crooked-v »

adamsea wrote: post #13
dredmorbius wrote: post #4

Interesting 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.

For a simple example, here's a map of Africa from just before World War I started: https://i.imgur.com/XZU6R0S.jpg

It would be pretty hard for, say, people in the Congo at the time to have started or continued lasting businesses when they were still getting over the whole "spend eighteen hours a day tapping rubber or they'll cut off the hands of everyone in your family, and even if you do they'll still kidnap your children and put them in schools where half will die of disease" thing that had been officially ended only six years before, and were still subject to wildly oppressive taxes and labor drafts that made getting out from under the weight of the Belgian overlords impossible.

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#28

Post by ksec »

Steltek wrote: post #5

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.

>Restaurants are a tough, low margin business

That is only common today when you have high rent. Most of the older business tends own the property ( Like early days McDonald ) and it will remain a competitive advantage.

That is of coz assuming your food is good enough.

Re: The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)

#30

Post by crooked-v »

jandrese wrote: post #16
adamsea wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

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