GEOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THE GREATEST ENTERPRISES OF THE WORLD
Abstract
The point of this paper is to give credits to Tamás Csapó on behalf of his 60th birthday and to examine the geography of the biggest companies as well, as he did in 2007, analyzing the Global 500 list of Fortune Magazine in 1998 and 2005. Therefore, I compare the dataset of 2005 and 2012 to map the shift in both sector (industries) and location (countries, headquarters). It seems to be interesting to study this short interval, because the 2005-2012 period includes the 2009 world economic crisis. As this is a memorial paper, I do not make any hypothesis, although, the dataset allows drawing conclusions to satisfy scientific needs:
- The sectorial shift is slowed; there are fewer changes between 2005 and 2012 than between 1998 and 2005.
- The geographical shift is immense: China seems to be the only challenger of the US, its proportion both in number and revenues of the global companies exploded in the studied period.
- Despite the 2009 world economic crisis, the number of countries represented by at least one company in the Global 500 list is higher, which contradicts the presumption of global crisis being selective: only the strongest survives. Obviously the crisis made place for the third world companies (especially in Asia, but according the rate, South America) by sweeping away weak performing enterprises.
- The Global 500 list provides a good base to classify countries by the way having headquarters of global companies, as follows: In China, France, UK, Japan the economy is seems to be more concentrated; their capitals have over proportional number of company’s headquarters. Germany is having a structure in which we cannot see any dominant city. Finally in the US economy there is a slightly dominance of New York to see, but the high number of global companies make the geography of company headquarters balanced. (We can find HQ-s in the East, in the West, in the South and in the Middle too, only few federal states and no major city are without global company HQ.
