Verisoph story dossier
From the chartered trading monopolies to the industrial giants and the platform companies: how the company became a world-shaping institution.
From the chartered trading monopolies to the industrial giants and the platform companies: how the company became a world-shaping institution.
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also in Production and labor
Prince Shotoku brings builders from Baekje to construct the Shitenno-ji temple, and the Kongo family firm they establish becomes the world's oldest documented company. It builds Buddhist temples in Japan for over 1,400 years.
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A deed from 1288 records the sale of a share in the Falun copper mine, the oldest known share document in any company. The mining enterprise later becomes Stora, an ancestor of today's Stora Enso.
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Queen Mary I charters the Muscovy Company to trade with Russia, making it the first major English chartered joint-stock company. Its permanent capital model becomes the template for later trading companies.
also in England 1588, Production and labor
Elizabeth I grants a royal charter to the East India Company with a monopoly on English trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. The company later conquers and rules much of India before the Crown takes over in 1858.
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The Dutch States General charters the VOC with a trade monopoly to Asia. It becomes the first company to issue tradeable shares to the public and dominates Asian sea trade for nearly two centuries.
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James I charters the Virginia Company to plant English colonies in North America. Its Jamestown settlement of 1607 becomes the first permanent English colony in the Americas.
also in Production and labor
Masatomo Sumitomo opens a book and medicine shop in Kyoto around 1615, and the family soon builds a copper smelting and mining business. The house grows into one of Japan's great zaibatsu conglomerates.
also in Production and labor
The Dutch States General charters the West India Company with a monopoly on trade in the Atlantic. It founds New Amsterdam, later New York, and runs a large share of the Dutch slave trade.
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Finance minister Colbert founds the Compagnie des Indes Orientales to compete with the Dutch and English in Asian trade. It establishes French footholds in India, setting up a century of Anglo-French rivalry there.
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Charles II charters the Hudson's Bay Company with a fur trade monopoly over the vast watershed of Hudson Bay. For two centuries it acts as the de facto government of much of what becomes Canada.
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Charles II charters the Royal African Company with a monopoly on English trade with West Africa, including trade in enslaved people. It ships more enslaved Africans to the Americas than any other single institution.
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Mitsui Takatoshi opens the Echigoya dry goods store in Edo, selling kimono fabric at fixed cash prices, a retail innovation. The Mitsui house grows into one of Japan's largest zaibatsu and the ancestor of Mitsui Group.
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The British government charters the South Sea Company, granting it a monopoly on trade with Spanish South America in exchange for taking over government debt. Its shares become the object of wild speculation.
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John Law organizes the Compagnie d'Occident with a monopoly on trade with French Louisiana. Merged with other ventures and backed by Law's bank, it fuels France's first great stock mania.
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Shares in John Law's Mississippi Company crash after paper money issued against them loses public confidence. The collapse ruins investors, wrecks France's finances, and sours the country on banks and paper money for decades.
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It was upon these solid foundations that Britain’s “credit” rested, despite early uncertainties, considerable political opposition, and a financial near-disaster like the collapse of the famous South
It was upon these solid foundations that Britain’s “credit” rested, despite early uncertainties, considerable political opposition, and a financial near-disaster like the collapse of the famous South Seas Bubble of 1720. “Despite all defects in the handling of English public finance,” its historian has noted, “for the rest of the century it remained more honest, as well as more efficient, than that of any other in Europe.”12 The result of all this was not only that interest rates steadily dropped,* but also that British government stock was increasingly attractive to foreign, and particularly Dutch, investors. Regular dealings in these securities on the Amsterdam market thus became an important part of the nexus of Anglo-Dutch commercial and financial relationships, with important effects upon the economies of both countries.13 In power-political terms, its value lay in the way in which the resources of the United Provinces repeatedly came to the aid of the British war effort, even when the Dutch alliance in the struggle against France had been replaced by an uneasy neutrality.The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
South Sea Company stock collapses after rising almost tenfold in months, ruining thousands of British investors. Parliament responds with the Bubble Act restricting new joint-stock companies.
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Sweden charters its own East India Company in Gothenburg to trade with China. Its tea and porcelain trade makes it the largest trading company in Sweden during the 18th century.
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Josiah Wedgwood opens his own pottery works in Staffordshire. His factory methods, marketing, and mass-produced fine ceramics make Wedgwood a pioneer of industrialized consumer goods.
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Arthur Guinness signs a 9,000-year lease on the St. James's Gate brewery in Dublin. His porter brewery grows into the largest in the world by the late 19th century.
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Matthew Boulton and James Watt form a partnership to build Watt's improved steam engine at the Soho works in Birmingham. Their engines power mines, mills, and factories, driving the Industrial Revolution.
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Deep in debt after decades of decline and war with Britain, the VOC is formally dissolved and its possessions taken over by the Dutch state. Its Asian territories become the Dutch East Indies.
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French emigre chemist E.I. du Pont founds a gunpowder mill on the Brandywine River in Delaware. The company grows into one of the world's largest chemical makers, later inventing nylon, Teflon, and Kevlar.
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Friedrich Krupp founds a cast steel works in Essen. Under his son Alfred it becomes Europe's largest company and Germany's dominant arms and steel maker, arming the country through both world wars.
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Scottish traders William Jardine and James Matheson found a trading house in Canton dealing in tea, cotton, and opium. The firm helps push Britain into the First Opium War and becomes a pillar of colonial Hong Kong commerce.
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Candle maker William Procter and soap maker James Gamble sign a partnership in Cincinnati. P&G becomes a giant of branded consumer goods and a pioneer of modern advertising, including the first soap operas.
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Werner von Siemens and Johann Georg Halske found a telegraph works in Berlin. The firm builds pioneering telegraph lines, dynamos, and electric railways, growing into Europe's largest electrical engineering company.
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Paul Julius Reuter opens a telegraph office in London transmitting stock prices between London and Paris. His agency becomes one of the world's dominant news services.
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Friedrich Bayer and Johann Weskott found a dye factory in Barmen. The company moves into pharmaceuticals and in 1899 trademarks aspirin, one of the most widely used drugs in history.
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The Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik is founded to make synthetic dyes on the Rhine. It later industrializes the Haber-Bosch process for synthetic ammonia and becomes the world's largest chemical company.
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Mining engineer Fredrik Idestam wins a permit for a wood pulp mill in Tampere, Finland. The paper company later diversifies and, more than a century on, becomes the world's largest mobile phone maker.
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The Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company opens in 1866, and Henri Nestle launches his infant food in Vevey the next year. The merged company becomes the world's largest food and drink business.
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Jamsetji Tata founds a trading firm in Bombay. The Tata group goes on to build India's first large steel plant, its first luxury hotel, and pioneering ventures in power, chemicals, and software, becoming India's largest conglomerate.
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Iwasaki Yataro founds the Tsukumo Shokai shipping firm, soon renamed Mitsubishi. It grows into one of Japan's great zaibatsu, spanning shipping, mining, banking, shipbuilding, and heavy industry.
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John D. Rockefeller and partners incorporate Standard Oil in Ohio. Through relentless consolidation it comes to control about 90 percent of American oil refining, the archetype of the industrial monopoly.
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British investors buy the ancient Rio Tinto copper mines in Spain from the Spanish government and float the company in London. It becomes one of the world's largest mining groups.
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The East India Company is formally dissolved, sixteen years after the Crown took over its Indian territories following the 1857 rebellion. It ends 274 years as the most powerful company in history.
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Lars Magnus Ericsson opens a telegraph repair workshop in Stockholm. The firm moves quickly into telephones and becomes one of the world's leading telecom equipment makers.
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Alexander Graham Bell's backers organize the Bell Telephone Company to commercialize his telephone patent. It evolves into AT&T, which dominates American telecommunications for a century.
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Karl Benz founds Benz & Cie in Mannheim and two years later builds the Patent-Motorwagen, the first practical automobile. The company later merges with Daimler to form Mercedes-Benz.
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George Westinghouse founds Westinghouse Electric in Pittsburgh to develop alternating current power. Backing Tesla's AC system, it wins the war of the currents against Edison's direct current.
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Pharmacist John Pemberton first sells his Coca-Cola syrup at Jacobs' Pharmacy in Atlanta. Under Asa Candler the drink becomes the world's most widely distributed product and a symbol of American culture.
also in Cecil Rhodes and the dream of empire, De Beers and the diamond model of extraction, Production and labor, Scholarships and the machinery of empire
Cecil Rhodes consolidates the Kimberley diamond mines into De Beers Consolidated Mines. The company controls most of the world's diamond supply for the next century.
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Fusajiro Yamauchi founds Nintendo in Kyoto to make hanafuda playing cards. Nearly a century later it reinvents itself as a video game company and revives the industry with the Famicom and Mario.
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Gerard Philips and his father found a light bulb factory in Eindhoven. Philips grows into one of the world's biggest electronics firms and co-develops the compact cassette and the CD; its chip unit spawns ASML and NXP.
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George Eastman incorporates Eastman Kodak, four years after launching the Kodak camera with the slogan 'You press the button, we do the rest.' Kodak makes photography a mass consumer activity.
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Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston merge to form General Electric. The company dominates American electrical industry for a century and is a founding member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
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Andrew Carnegie consolidates his steel operations into the Carnegie Steel Company. Using Bessemer technology and ruthless cost cutting, it becomes the largest and most profitable steel maker in the world.
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Guglielmo Marconi registers the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company in London to commercialize radio. Its transatlantic transmissions and ship-to-shore wireless launch the radio communications industry.
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The United Fruit Company forms from a merger of banana traders in Boston. Its control of land, railways, and politics in Central America gives rise to the term 'banana republic.'
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J.P. Morgan merges Carnegie Steel with rivals to form United States Steel, the world's first billion-dollar corporation. At its creation it produces about two thirds of American steel.
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Henry Ford incorporates the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. Its Model T of 1908 becomes the first car cheap enough for ordinary families, putting America and then the world on wheels.
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The Haloid Company is founded in Rochester to make photographic paper. It later commercializes xerography as Xerox, and its PARC lab invents the graphical user interface, Ethernet, and laser printing.
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Charles Rolls and Henry Royce formally found Rolls-Royce to build luxury cars. The company later becomes one of the world's leading aero engine makers, powering Allied aircraft in both world wars.
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Royal Dutch Petroleum and Britain's Shell Transport and Trading merge to challenge Standard Oil. The combined group becomes one of the world's largest oil companies.
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William Durant founds General Motors as a holding company for Buick, soon adding Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Chevrolet. Under Alfred Sloan it becomes the world's largest automaker and a model of the modern corporation.
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The Anglo-Persian Oil Company is founded after the first major oil strike in the Middle East, in Persia in 1908. The British government buys a controlling stake in 1914, and the company becomes British Petroleum.
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Namihei Odaira founds Hitachi as an electrical repair shop at a copper mine, building Japan's first 5-horsepower electric motors. It grows into one of Japan's largest industrial and electronics groups.
also in Capitalism, liberalism, and the isms, Production and labor
The U.S. Supreme Court finds Standard Oil an illegal monopoly and orders it split into 34 companies, among them the ancestors of Exxon, Mobil, and Chevron. It remains the landmark antitrust action in business history.
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The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company forms from a merger of punched card and scale makers, renamed IBM in 1924. Under the Watsons it comes to dominate business machines and then the computer industry.
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Ford installs the first moving assembly line for cars at its Highland Park plant, cutting Model T chassis assembly from over 12 hours to about 93 minutes. Mass production transforms manufacturing worldwide.
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William Boeing incorporates the Pacific Aero Products Company in Seattle, renamed Boeing the next year. It becomes the world's leading builder of airliners, including the 707 and 747 that define the jet age.
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Konosuke Matsushita founds Matsushita Electric in Osaka, starting with light socket adapters. It becomes one of the world's largest consumer electronics makers under the Panasonic and National brands.
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The four Warner brothers incorporate their film studio in Hollywood. Its 1927 release The Jazz Singer, the first feature with synchronized speech, ends the silent film era.
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Walt and Roy Disney found the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Los Angeles. Mickey Mouse, the first feature-length animated film, and theme parks make Disney the world's dominant entertainment company.
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BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, and other German chemical firms merge into IG Farben, the largest chemical company in the world. Deeply complicit in Nazi crimes, including a factory at Auschwitz, it is broken up by the Allies after 1945.
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Pan American Airways is founded, flying its first mail route from Key West to Havana. Under Juan Trippe it pioneers transoceanic flying boats and the jet age, becoming the unofficial U.S. flag carrier.
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Britain's Lever Brothers and the Dutch Margarine Unie agree to merge, creating Unilever with dual British and Dutch parents. It becomes one of the world's largest consumer goods companies.
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Carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen starts making wooden toys in Billund, Denmark, naming the firm Lego from 'leg godt,' play well. Its interlocking plastic brick, patented in 1958, becomes the world's best known toy.
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Saudi Arabia signs an oil concession with Standard Oil of California, which forms the California Arabian Standard Oil Company, later Aramco. Sitting on the world's largest oil reserves, it becomes the most valuable oil company on earth.
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The Nazi labor front founds Volkswagen to build Ferdinand Porsche's 'people's car,' with a factory at what becomes Wolfsburg. After the war the Beetle becomes the best selling car in history and VW a global auto giant.
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Kiichiro Toyoda spins the Toyota Motor Corporation out of his father's loom works. Its lean production system becomes the world's most studied manufacturing method, and Toyota becomes the largest automaker.
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Lee Byung-chul founds Samsung as a small trading company in Daegu dealing in groceries and dried fish. It grows into South Korea's largest chaebol, spanning electronics, shipbuilding, and construction.
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After President Cardenas expropriates foreign oil companies, Mexico creates the state firm Petroleos Mexicanos. The nationalization becomes a model cited by oil-producing countries worldwide.
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Bill Hewlett and David Packard formalize their partnership, working from a Palo Alto garage now marked as the birthplace of Silicon Valley. HP grows into a leading maker of instruments, computers, and printers.
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Seventeen-year-old Ingvar Kamprad founds IKEA in rural Sweden, initially selling by mail order. Its flat-pack furniture and giant stores make it the world's largest furniture retailer.
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Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita found Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo in bombed-out Tokyo, renamed Sony in 1958. Transistor radios, the Trinitron, the Walkman, and the PlayStation make it a symbol of Japan's postwar rise.
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Chung Ju-yung founds the Hyundai construction company in Seoul. The chaebol expands into shipbuilding and cars, building the world's largest shipyard and helping drive South Korea's industrialization.
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Koo In-hwoi founds Lak Hui Chemical in Busan, making cosmetics and later Korea's first plastics. With its Goldstar electronics arm it becomes the LG chaebol, one of South Korea's largest conglomerates.
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Soichiro Honda incorporates the Honda Motor Company in Hamamatsu, starting with motorized bicycles. It becomes the world's largest motorcycle maker and a major automaker known for its engines.
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Italy creates the state energy group ENI under Enrico Mattei. Mattei's deals offering producer countries better terms challenge the dominance of the major Anglo-American oil companies.
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Brazil founds the state oil company Petrobras under the slogan 'the oil is ours.' It later pioneers deepwater drilling and becomes Latin America's largest company.
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Ray Kroc opens his first franchised McDonald's in Des Plaines, Illinois, building on the McDonald brothers' fast service system. The chain becomes the world's largest restaurant company and a symbol of globalization.
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Eight engineers leave Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild, which co-invents the integrated circuit. Its alumni go on to found Intel, AMD, and dozens of other firms, seeding Silicon Valley.
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Sam Walton opens the first Walmart discount store in Rogers, Arkansas. Its logistics-driven low prices make it the world's largest retailer and largest private employer.
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Phil Knight and coach Bill Bowerman found Blue Ribbon Sports to import Japanese running shoes, relaunching it as Nike in 1971. Its swoosh and athlete marketing make it the world's largest sportswear company.
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Dhirubhai Ambani, who began trading spices and yarn in 1958, incorporates Reliance Textiles and builds a synthetic fabrics mill. Reliance grows into India's largest private company, spanning petrochemicals, refining, and telecom.
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Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore leave Fairchild to found Intel. It launches the first commercial microprocessor in 1971 and its chips power the personal computer revolution.
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Samsung founds its electronics arm in Suwon, initially making televisions. It becomes the world's largest maker of memory chips and smartphones and the core of the Samsung group.
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France and Germany form the Airbus consortium in Toulouse to build the A300 airliner. The European venture grows into Boeing's only rival in large commercial aircraft.
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Starbucks opens its first store near Pike Place Market in Seattle, selling roasted coffee beans. Under Howard Schultz it turns the espresso bar into a global retail format with tens of thousands of stores.
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Five former IBM engineers found SAP in Germany to build standard business software. Its enterprise resource planning systems come to run the accounting and logistics of most large corporations.
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Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft in Albuquerque to sell BASIC for the Altair microcomputer. Its MS-DOS and Windows operating systems come to run the vast majority of the world's personal computers.
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Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne found Apple to sell Wozniak's Apple I computer. The Macintosh, iPod, and iPhone later make Apple the most valuable company in the world.
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Larry Ellison and partners found Software Development Laboratories, later Oracle, to build the first commercial SQL relational database. Oracle databases become the standard for corporate data.
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N.R. Narayana Murthy and six colleagues found Infosys with about 250 dollars of capital. It becomes a flagship of India's software outsourcing industry and a maker of middle-class wealth through employee stock.
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A federal antitrust settlement splits the Bell System, separating AT&T from seven regional phone companies. The breakup ends a century-long telephone monopoly and opens U.S. telecommunications to competition.
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Philips and ASM International spin off ASML in Veldhoven to build chip lithography machines. Its extreme ultraviolet machines later become the only tools capable of making the most advanced chips.
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Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner of Stanford found Cisco Systems to sell multiprotocol routers. Its equipment carries much of the internet's traffic, and in 2000 it is briefly the world's most valuable company.
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Morris Chang founds the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the first pure-play chip foundry. Making chips designed by others, it becomes the world's most advanced chipmaker and a linchpin of the global economy.
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Former army engineer Ren Zhengfei founds Huawei in Shenzhen, initially reselling phone switches. It becomes the world's largest telecom equipment maker and a focal point of U.S.-China technology tensions.
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China dissolves its Ministry of Petroleum and creates the China National Petroleum Corporation to run its oil and gas industry. CNPC and its listed arm PetroChina become one of the world's largest energy groups.
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The Soviet Ministry of Gas Industry is converted into the State Gas Concern Gazprom, the USSR's first state corporate enterprise. Privatized after 1991, it controls the world's largest gas reserves and Russia's export pipelines.
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Acorn, Apple, and VLSI Technology found Advanced RISC Machines in Cambridge. Its licensed low-power chip designs end up in almost every smartphone on earth.
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Pan American World Airways ceases operations after decades of losses, deregulation, and the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. The fall of the pioneering international airline marks the end of aviation's golden age.
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Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem found Nvidia to build graphics chips. Its GPUs turn out to be ideal for training neural networks, making Nvidia the central supplier of the AI boom and one of the world's most valuable companies.
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Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen found the company behind the Navigator web browser. Its 1995 IPO ignites the dot-com boom, and its loss of the browser war to Microsoft becomes a defining antitrust case.
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Jeff Bezos founds Amazon in a Bellevue garage as an online bookstore. It grows into the dominant force in e-commerce and, through Amazon Web Services, invents the cloud computing industry.
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Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph found Netflix as a DVD-by-mail service. Its shift to streaming in 2007 upends television and the film industry worldwide.
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Stanford students Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporate Google in a Menlo Park garage. Its PageRank search engine and advertising model make it the gateway to the web and one of history's most profitable companies.
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Pony Ma and partners found Tencent in Shenzhen, launching the QQ messenger. Its WeChat super-app and games business make it China's most valuable technology company.
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Former English teacher Jack Ma and 17 co-founders launch Alibaba from his Hangzhou apartment. Its Taobao and Tmall marketplaces make it the dominant force in Chinese e-commerce, and its 2014 IPO is then the largest ever.
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Exxon and Mobil, the two largest fragments of Standard Oil, complete an 81 billion dollar merger. It reunites much of Rockefeller's empire and creates what is then the world's largest company.
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Robin Li and Eric Xu found Baidu in Beijing. It becomes China's dominant search engine and later a major investor in autonomous driving and artificial intelligence.
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Energy trader Enron files what is then the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history after massive accounting fraud is exposed. The scandal wipes out employee pensions and leads to the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms.
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Elon Musk founds SpaceX to cut the cost of spaceflight. Its reusable Falcon rockets and Starlink constellation make it the dominant commercial launch provider and the first private company to fly astronauts to orbit.
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Accounting giant Arthur Andersen is convicted of obstruction for shredding Enron audit documents and surrenders its licenses, ending a 89-year-old firm. The Big Five accounting firms become the Big Four.
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Telecom carrier WorldCom files for bankruptcy after revealing billions in fraudulent accounting, surpassing Enron as the largest U.S. bankruptcy to date. CEO Bernard Ebbers is later jailed for fraud.
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Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning incorporate Tesla Motors, soon joined and led by Elon Musk. Its electric cars force the global auto industry to abandon the internal combustion engine.
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Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launches thefacebook.com from his dorm. Renamed Meta in 2021, the company's social networks come to connect billions of people and reshape media and politics.
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Unable to service debts taken on during Japan's bubble era, the 1,428-year-old temple builder Kongo Gumi goes into liquidation and its assets pass to Takamatsu Construction. The world's oldest independent company ends.
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General Motors files for bankruptcy during the financial crisis, the largest industrial bankruptcy in U.S. history. A government-backed restructuring saves a smaller GM, with taxpayers briefly its majority owner.
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Video rental chain Blockbuster files for bankruptcy after failing to answer Netflix and streaming, having once passed on buying Netflix for 50 million dollars. It becomes the standard cautionary tale of digital disruption.
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Eastman Kodak files for bankruptcy after digital photography destroyed its film business, a technology Kodak itself invented in 1975. It becomes a byword for incumbents overtaken by their own innovations.
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Zhang Yiming founds ByteDance in a Beijing apartment. Its recommendation-driven apps Douyin and TikTok become the first Chinese consumer software to dominate globally, reshaping online video.
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Nokia completes the sale of its phone division to Microsoft after the iPhone and Android destroyed its market lead. The onetime maker of 4 in 10 of the world's phones retreats to network equipment.
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Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and others found OpenAI as a research lab aiming at safe artificial general intelligence. Its ChatGPT launch in 2022 becomes the fastest-adopted consumer product in history and sets off the AI boom.
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Sears, once America's largest retailer and the inventor of the mail-order catalog economy, files for bankruptcy after years of decline against Walmart and Amazon.
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German payments firm Wirecard files for insolvency after admitting 1.9 billion euros on its balance sheet likely never existed. The fraud at a DAX company becomes Germany's biggest postwar corporate scandal.
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Cryptocurrency exchange FTX files for bankruptcy after customer funds are found to have been funneled to founder Sam Bankman-Fried's trading firm. Bankman-Fried is convicted of fraud, and the crash deepens a broad crypto winter.
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The Hudson's Bay Company files for creditor protection and liquidates its Canadian department stores, closing them by mid-2025. North America's oldest company ends 355 years of continuous operation.
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