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Interesting: "The country is currently home to more than 50,000 businesses that are over 100 years old. Of those, 3,886 have been around for more than 200 years
by crispy2000 12y ago
Interesting: "The country is currently home to more than 50,000 businesses that are over 100 years old. Of those, 3,886 have been around for more than 200 years. As a point of comparison, only one in every four U.S. companies founded in 1994 was still operating in 2004, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
The "point of comparison" is nothing of the kind. There's no indication of what ratio of new businesses in Japan survive their first 20 years. Look up survivor bias.
- aquadrop 12y agoEven more so, they try comparing absolute numbers with ratio.
- barking 12y agoreminds me of this http://i.imgur.com/gNefvUG.png http://i.imgur.com/gNefvUG.png
- matt_s 12y agoIt should have been written as: "a point of comparison is that all US businesses aren't older than 239 years." And then something about what US businesses are older than 100. They weren't really comparing anything.
- mburns 12y agoWikipedia lists 18 businesses in the US that have been operating since before 1776. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies_in_the...
- vacri 12y agoTechnically the businesses can be older, but they can't be "US businesses" for longer than the US existed. That doesn't take away from the spirit of your point, though.
- derefr 12y agoI'm now very curious which companies have managed to survive major ownership changes in their nation-of-business, and whether there was continuity of management/shareholdership in those cases or not. Hong Kong would probably be pretty easy to study for that.
- bbanyc 12y agoThe Hudson's Bay Company used to be the owner of its nation-of-business (Rupert's Land, now western Canada). Today it's a department store chain in Canada and the parent company of two chains (Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue) in the US.
- culturestate 12y agoThe handover caused very little, if any, disruption to business in Hong Kong. The city still runs itself for all intents and purposes as an independent country, just with a new flag on the mast.
- derefr 12y agoThe most recent handover was minimal, yes. I'm more curious as to whether any single organization in Hong Kong existed prior to 1842 that still exists today, thus having survived two sovereignty changes.
- culturestate 12y agoMacau would probably be a better subject if that's your aim. There was almost nothing in Hong Kong before the opium wars -- a couple of thousand people in fishing villages -- but the Portuguese were in Macau for ~400 years. Unfortunately, I'm not very well versed on the latter.
- kiiski 12y agoI imagine that it would be even easier to look at European companies, as there has been lots of border changes there. According to a quick search into Finnish companies, the currently oldest one (Fiskars, founded in 1649) has survived the transitions from Swedish rule to Russian rule (1809) and to independence (1917). The owners have changed several times. The oldest one that remained in the same family seems to be Frenckells printshop, which survived from 1642 to 2008.
- raverbashing 12y agoFor North America, this is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson%27s_Bay_Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson%27s_Bay_Company
- davidw 12y agoThe history of Zildjian is interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avedis_Zildjian_Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avedis_Zildjian_Company
- Russell91 12y agoThis is exactly what I came here to say. Now I don't have to. It's hard for me to continue reading an article after reading such an obvious logical error.
- mc32 12y agoIt's a ridiculous article. I bet the author took one fact, that in Japan businesses occasionally are bequeathed to adult-adopted sons, took that and fleshed out an article around that and dressed it as a "change in banking attitudes leads to old companies going bankrupt".