Category: Foreign Policy

22/3/16

Salam.

These 25 Companies Are More Powerful Than Many Countries | Foreign Policy

These 25 Companies Are More Powerful Than Many Countries

New name for the privileged few.  Basically multinational corporations or MNCs gone “viral”.  Nothing new in it except every few years new terminologies r coined 2 create a hype on basically exploiting the lesser developed world filled with corruption n ineffective laws 2 protect their interests n exploit their talents.  So the poorer countries say we hav got foreign investments when they allow these mammoth MNCs in2 their countries, who already had their legal dept 2 do their homework n researched inside out of all the weeknesses n gaps in all the areas they operate eg., labor, taxation, financial (central bank circulars 2 ministry of finance ordinances), foreign xchange regimes laws, board of investments facilities et al..  Objective 2 turn every little  loopholes in2 money making opportunities.

So these mostly american metanationals or ole MNCs r allmost looked upon as donor agencies infusing few million capital and/ or infrastructure dollars.  They then become local paymasters comparable 2 other employers although an ordinary employee of these companies wud b able 2 hav corruption less glitzy middle class life with hardly any savings for the future.  The earings 2 payout 2 employees ratio in their exploiting land is ridiculous compared 2 bak home.  But in a hi jobless mkt they go unchallenged.  Here is a huge income that is never given a name or even ever mentioned, n all these on top of the tax holidays most of these enjoys.  Then they hav the IMF working on their behalf 2 devalue the currency which helps them 2 extend their holidays n increase their local revenue base.  A fatter local b/s helps 2 boost their home stock prices.  Then comes the worst scenario. These MNCs hoarded income is most of the times much larger than their host countries GDP.  This brings the saga of political intervention 2 exploit more.  Reminds me the most popular TV serial Dallas where oil tycoon Jr ewing ordering over fon 2 his employee in a small south american country 2 change the government 2 win drilling rites.  Jr’s answer 2 his rather surprised employee was money buys everything.  we were tot in the marketing classes thru a very senior exec of morton thiacol who r famous for making salts 2 rocket engines (another terminology 2 define these big evils, conglomerates) that it’s a doggy dog world out there so sometimes u throw away the ethics n wotever students learn in these classes n adopt extra curricular activities, I hav named.  Then he mentioned 1 such activity of his Co that was going on then which I wud rather not mention bcoz it’s considered highly immoral in our 1st n foremost ethics n guidance ie., islam.

Some might think that these 25 (n quite a few more) r genious n clean as their angels but 2 me they r the coz of global exploitation n economic disasters. They r shytwans ambition 2 create a ruling few over the rest (out of 25 max r american, anglo or european n only 4 Asian regardless where they r registered as head office bcoz it is the mgmt that matters).  Once u allow them eventually they become fish bones stuck in yor throat, neither can u swallow them or spit them out.

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These 25 Companies Are More Powerful Than Many Countries
Going stateless to maximize profits, multinational companies are vying with governments for global power. Who is winning?
BY PARAG KHANNA
TOP 25 BY DAVID FRANCIS
ILLUSTRATION BY EDEL RODRIGUEZ

At first glance, the story of Accenture reads like the archetype of the American dream. One of the world’s biggest consulting companies, which commands tens of billions of dollars in annual revenues, was born in the 1950s as a small division of accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Its first major project was advising General Electric to install a computer at a Kentucky facility in order to automate payment processing. Several decades of growth followed, and by 1989, the division was successful enough to become its own organization: Andersen Consulting.

Yet a deeper look at the business shows its ascent veering off the American track. This wasn’t because it opened foreign offices in Mexico, Japan, and other countries; international expansion is pro forma for many U.S. companies. Rather, Andersen Consulting saw benefits—fewer taxes, cheaper labor, less onerous regulations — beyond borders and restructured internally to take advantage of them. By 2001, when it went public after adopting the name Accenture, it had morphed into a network of franchises loosely coordinated out of a Swiss holding company. It incorporated in Bermuda and stayed there until 2009, when it redomiciled in Ireland, another low-tax jurisdiction. Today, Accenture’s roughly 373,000 employees are scattered across more than 200 cities in 55 countries. Consultants parachute into locations for commissioned work but often report to offices in regional hubs, such as Prague and Dubai, with lower tax rates. To avoid pesky residency status, the human resources department ensures that employees don’t spend too much time at their project sites.

Welcome to the age of metanationals: companies that, like Accenture, are effectively stateless. When business and strategy experts Yves Doz, José Santos, and Peter Williamson coined the term in a 2001 book, metanationals were an emerging phenomenon, a divergence from the tradition of corporations taking pride in their national roots. (In the 1950s, General Motors President Charles Wilson famously said, “What was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”) Today, the severing of state lifelines has become business as usual.

ExxonMobil, Unilever, BlackRock, HSBC, DHL, Visa—these companies all choose locations for personnel, factories, executive suites, or bank accounts based on where regulations are friendly, resources abundant, and connectivity seamless. Clever metanationals often have legal domicile in one country, corporate management in another, financial assets in a third, and administrative staff spread over several more. Some of the largest American-born firms — GE, IBM, Microsoft, to name a few — collectively are holding trillions of dollars tax-free offshore by having revenues from overseas markets paid to holding companies incorporated in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, or Singapore. In a nice illustration of the tension this trend creates with policymakers, some observers have dubbed the money “stateless income,” while U.S. President Barack Obama has called the companies hoarding it America’s “corporate deserters.”

It isn’t surprising, of course, when companies find new ways to act in their own interest; it’s surprising when they don’t. The rise of metanationals, however, isn’t just about new ways of making money. It also unsettles the definition of “global superpower.”

The debate over that term usually focuses on states—that is, can any country compete with America’s status and influence? In June 2015, the Pew Research Center surveyed people in 40 countries and found that a median of 48 percent thought China had or would surpass the United States as a superpower, while just 35 percent said it never would. Pew, however, might have considered widening its scope of research — for corporations are likely to overtake all states in terms of clout.

Already, the cash that Apple has on hand exceeds the GDPs of two-thirds of the world’s countries. Firms are also setting the pace vis-à-vis government regulators in a perennial game of cat-and-mouse. After the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act to discourage banks from growing excessively big and catastrophe-prone. Yet while the law crushed some smaller financial institutions, the largest banks — with operations spread across many countries — actually became even larger, amassing more capital and lending less. Today, the 10 biggest banks still control almost 50 percent of assets under management worldwide. Meanwhile, some European Union officials, including Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, are pushing for a common tax-base policy among member states to prevent corporations from taking advantage of preferential rates. But if that happened (and it’s a very big if), firms would just look beyond the continent for metanational opportunities.

The world is entering an era in which the most powerful law is not that of sovereignty but that of supply and demand. As scholar Gary Gereffi of Duke University has argued, denationalization now involves companies assembling the capacities of various locations into their global value chains. This has birthed success for companies, such as commodities trader Glencore and logistics firm Archer Daniels Midland, that don’t focus primarily on manufacturing goods, but are experts at getting the physical ingredients of what metanationals make wherever they’re needed.

Could businesses go a step further, shifting from stateless to virtual? Some people think so. In 2013, Balaji Srinivasan, now a partner at the venture-capital company Andreessen Horowitz, gave a much debated talk in which he claimed Silicon Valley is becoming more powerful than Wall Street and the U.S. government. He described “Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit,” or the creation of “an opt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., run by technology.” The idea is that because social communities increasingly exist online, businesses and their operations might move entirely into the cloud.

Much as the notion of taxing a metanational based on its headquarters’ location now seems painfully antiquated, Srinivasan’s ultimate exit may ring of techie utopianism. If stateless companies live by one rule, however, it’s that there’s always another place to go where profits are higher, oversight friendlier, and opportunities more plentiful. This belief has helped nimble, mobile, and smart corporations outgrow their original masters, including the world’s reigning superpower. Seen in this light, metanationals disassociating from terrestrial restraints and harnessing the power of the cloud is anything but far-fetched. It may even be inevitable.

The Top 25 Corporate Nations

BY DAVID FRANCIS

HUMAN SCALE

Number of Walmart employees:
2.2 million
Population of Slovenia:
2.1 million

ExxonMobil, whose roots stretch back to 1859, today boasts a 75,300-strong workforce that explores for oil and natural gas on six continents.

Royal Dutch Shell has oil interests in all corners of the world — more than 70 countries, to be exact — but the Anglo-Dutch multinational may have left its biggest footprint in Nigeria, where it has more than 50 oil-producing fields, a network of approximately 3,107 miles of oil and gas pipelines and flow lines, two major oil export terminals, and five gas plants.

Apple’s economic output (2014)
$87 billion
Oman’s annual GDP (2014)
$82 billion

Perhaps most notorious for its business interests in Africa, Glencore has the power to make or break economies there. In September 2015, it dealt a blow to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it has temporarily closed a mine, no longer profitable, that produced 20 percent of the country’s copper output.

Value of Samsung’s brand:
$45 billion
Value of the national brand of Croatia:
$32 billion

Number of Amazon active users:
244 million
Population of Brazil:
204 million

Microsoft Office: 1.2 billion users
107 languages spoken
Cyprus: 1.2 million population
2 official languages spoken (Greek and Turkish)

With 333,000 employees and 447 factories in 86 countries, Nestlé is the world’s largest food maker, peddling its products in 196 nations.

Founded just last year to serve as the parent company for Google, this multinational tech conglomerate has a market cap of $547 billion, making it the world’s most valuable public company.

Uber’s car fleet
1.1 million
U.S. government vehicle fleet
633,851

Providing low-cost tele­communications tech for the developing world, Huawei services and products are in 170 countries.

Number of Vodafone mobile customers
461 million
U.S. population
323 million

The world’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev has a 46 percent market share in the United States.

Annually, Maersk ships 11 million containers to nearly every port in the world. If all of its containers were piled together, they would equal 8,550 Eiffel Towers stacked on top of each other.

Goldman Sachs’s assets under supervision (2015)
$1.2 trillion
Russia’s international reserves (2015)
$368 billion

Halliburton’s 2014 capital expenditures
$3.3 billion
Czech Republic’s 2014 military expenditures
$2 billion

Providing the plumbing of corporate modernization worldwide, Accenture’s employees work in more than 200 cities in 55 countries.

McDonald’s representation
36,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries
Number of American military sites around the world
4,855

Average age of an Emirates plane:
6 years
Average age of Canadian air force’s CF-18 fighter jet:
27.5 years

Facebook’s total energy use, 2013
822 million kilowatt-hours
Bermuda’s total energy use, 2013
664 million kilowatt-hours

Alibaba’s sales during its one-day online shopping festival in November 2015:
$14.3 billion
Chad’s annual GDP:
$14 billion

U.K. currency reserves (2014):
$108 billion
U.S. currency reserves (2014):
$434 billion
Japanese currency reserves (2014):
$1.3 trillion
BlackRock’s assets under management (2014):
$4.65 trillion

Languages spoken by McKinsey employees
More than 120
Languages recognized in Spain
9

Twitter revolutions:
5
Revolutions in U.S. history:
1

Parag Khanna (@paragkhanna) is the author of the forthcoming book Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization.

David Francis (@davidcfrancis) is a senior reporter for Foreign Policy.

A version of this article originally appeared in the March/April 2016 issue of FP under the title “Rise of the Titans.”

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