i wonder if the Fortune list released 60 years from now in 2077 might only be six or twelve and look more like the Rollerball sponsored companies of Energy, Food, Entertainment, Housing, Aviation, etcHow about the Dow?
ping
Once a company goes public, it needs to continue to show growth to maintain it’s stock price, and it’s easier to grow by M&A than organically. Plus, the larger and more dominant a company becomes the more it’s investments and new product development resources are focused on existing customers and markets. This is “The Innovators Dilemma”, and creates opportunities for more innovative and agile new entrants to surpass them, and ultimately create new growth, which then makes these new companies lucrative acquisition targets. There are countless examples, but perhaps one everyone can relate to is Kodak, which was busy making it’s film business bigger and better while new entrants leapfrogged them with digital photography.
Big fish eat little fish if they want to survive.
i wonder if the Fortune list released 60 years from now in 2077 might only be six or twelve and look more like the Rollerball sponsored companies of Energy, Food, Entertainment, Housing, Aviation, etcSeveral companies on that list didn’t exist in 1955.
Lockheed and Martin Marietta merged in 1995.
Navistar was created in 1986 from what was left after most of the International Harvester assets were sold off to other companies.
What is now AT&T is the Southwestern Bell division of the old pre-breakup AT&T. They acquired some of the other old divisions of the old AT&T, but others are now known as Verizon while Bell Labs became Lucent which was taken over by Acatel which was taken over by Nokia.
There may be others.
On the other hand, the list came out just in time for Monsanto (which isn’t really Monsanto - it was gobbled up in about 1999 by Pharmacia.) The current Monsanto (created out of Pharmacia assets) is going to disappear again in a few months.
It surprised me to see Avon on the 2017 list. I wonder how long they will remain on it.
Bookmark
I was curious why I did not see Ford on these lists, so I did some research. In 1956, Ford Motor Company became a public company (IPO launched) and immediately went to number 3 on the Fortune 500. Currently, they are #10.
Another reason is when a family dominated publicly traded company runs out of family members interested in running the business.
Case in point: Gerber Products Company, which was #348 on the list in 1955 and #307 in 1994 at the time when the shareholders of the company sold their shares to Swiss pharmaceutical firm Sandoz (now Novartis).
Frank Gerber founded the company, and his son Dan made Gerber a household name nationwide, with trusted baby food products and one of the most notable trademarks in American commerce. Dan had four daughters and one son. The daughters all married Ivy League types who were nice guys (one of them was a very successful real estate investor and two others had desk jobs within the company) but with little desire or aptitude for running a business which had expanded to places like continental Europe and South Africa. The son spent his adulthood driving race cars and writing poetry; he tried teaching high school students but didn’t make it through his first semester.
Dan died in 1974, and by 1990, with no capable family members left to receive the torch, the Gerber heirs and their advisors decided that the best course of action was to sell the company as a going business. It took them a few years (they openly were courting Anderson-Clayton, and quietly were talking to Campbell Soup), and ended up with Sandoz, which became Novartis. Novartis got out of the baby food business when they sold Gerber to Nestle, its major international competitor.
My father was a career Gerber employee (1948-1984), and I am a Gerber baby, having grown up in Fremont, Michigan, Gerber’s HQ.
Funny, not one mention about women and minorities being forcibly integrated into middle and upper management positions, in the name of Affirmative Action, during this exact timespan...hmmmm!
The elephant in the room that no one talks about.