February 2, 2005

10:20 PM

Is there a chart that shows what major companies own other companies (preferably constantly updated)? A lot of buyouts / mergers have been taking place lately and I'd like to see how the corporate power is centralized / organized. I also seem to recall a site that mapped power relations between powerful corporate individuals, and that would be of interest as well.
posted by banished to (13 comments total)

Banished,

My personal professional experience researching this stuff is limited to print sources. However, here's a primer I found that ought to help you find info online.

The SEC site is useful as well, although you need to have a little background information before you start searching there.
posted by mudpuppie at 10:32 PM on February 2, 2005

Who Owns What.
posted by Jairus at 10:41 PM on February 2, 2005

I think the site you're referring to that mapped connections between corporate individuals is They Rule. [Flash required]
posted by robbie01 at 10:45 PM on February 2, 2005

Wikipedia's Who owns what
posted by milkrate at 11:33 PM on February 2, 2005

Badcorp also has a listing "Who owns who". It's quite decent, includes a product search function.
posted by Jack Karaoke at 11:35 PM on February 2, 2005

You can always spend a couple hours studying Altria ...
posted by Shane at 4:46 AM on February 3, 2005

('Cuz, ya know, you pretty much can't breathe without Altria making some kind of profit off you... )

...and by the way, Oligopoly Watch is cool in general.)
posted by Shane at 4:49 AM on February 3, 2005

On a side note : TheyRule
posted by XiBe at 5:44 AM on February 3, 2005

On a side note : TheyRule

Oh. My. God. That's brilliant! I clicked on Load Map, then Popular, then Why Harvard doesn't fund alternative medical research ....

Brilliant. Goldmine. Jackpot.
posted by Shane at 6:31 AM on February 3, 2005

They Rule has been around for some time, and I'm not sure if the connections are still valid, but as everyone here suggests: It Rules
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:53 AM on February 3, 2005

Now that everyone's done answering the question, I'll give an example.

Look, Cingular (co-owned by BellSouth) bought AT&T Wireless, but AT&T retained the name "AT&T Wireless" so that they could bring out cellphone service under that name. The plan was to use Sprint's towers / service to do so. But then SBC bought AT&T (or agreed to). SBC has a big investment in Cingular, so now it looks like AT&T Wireless' new service will come out thru SBC, and use Cingular's towers / service. So though Cingular just went thru the very expensive transition period to get rid of AT&T Wireless, chances are they're going to have a new competitor, that uses their backend hardware, that's called AT&T Wireless.
posted by zpousman at 7:21 AM on February 3, 2005

Remember those commercials in the early-to-mid-80s (I'm talking in the USA here) that'd end with "We're Beatrice"? Whatever happened to Beatrice? Did it get renamed, bought out, or what? There was a period there where stand-up comics would crack about Beatrice's buying the world, and today I have no idea what the deal is....
posted by kimota at 1:04 PM on February 3, 2005

Catching up on my mefi reading on the weekend, so no one is probably reading this thread anymore, but, I too, was fascinated/horrified by the Beatrice ads back then...
I did a quick search on the web and found this:

Every Milken-funded [corporate] takeover resulted in the sell-off of divisions or units ... A striking case in point was the breakup of the Beatrice Companies, an ungainly agglomeration that combined, with little logic, Avis car rentals, Coca-Cola bottling, Playtex brassieres, the manufacture of tampons, along with the food processineg that had once formed its core business. After its parts were sold to other companies, Beatrice was a much smaller firm operating more sensibly in the food, cheese and meat business (Toffler pp. 52-53).
posted by j at 8:43 AM on February 5, 2005