Big companies play in many markets (read: countries). Just to deal with financing, taxes, regulations, legal, and everything you can imagine that is related to

Big companies play in many markets (read: countries). Just to deal with financing, taxes, regulations, legal, and everything you can imagine that is related to "doing business", not even considering resources to deal with Marketing/Sales/Support, and definitely not to "building products" (engineering), it can take hundreds of employees. To make things more interesting, the bigger the portfolio of a company, even higher is the number of employees. Regarding the cost of "doing business", consider this: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.TAX.DURS?year_high_desc=false https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.TAX.DURS?year_high_d... And here's a story about it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joeharpaz/2013/12/17/brazil-ranked-most-time-consuming-tax-regime-in-the-world/#18b3b3694c2d https://www.forbes.com/sites/joeharpaz/2013/12/17/brazil-ran... TL;DR on both links above: in Brazil, a company may spend as well as 2,600 hours a year to comply with taxes. Now imagine a company with hundreds, if not thousands of contracts, customers, multiple invoices, and so on. Even if they outsourced this, it'd still require a lot of employees, distributed worldwide in every market/country that company wants to do business in to deal with local regulations. Oracle has over 136,000 employees, but also has offices in almost every country - definitely in every continent. Based on the latest Fact Sheet [1], here's an idea: More than 138,000 employees, including: - - 40,000 developers and engineers - - 16,000 support and services specialists, who speak 29 languages - - 19,000 implementation consultants [1] http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/oracle-fact-sheet-079219.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/oracle-fact-sheet-079219.... disclaimer: I work for Oracle.