Hollowing Out, Part 1: 30 of Canada’s Top 100 Companies in 1995 Have Since Been Taken Over by Multinational Corporations
In honour of the recent controversy over the proposed takeover of Nexen by the government of China (since only foreign governments are allowed to make money off of Canada’s oil patch, not our own government), I thought it might be nice to start a major new project, devoted to studying the hollowing out of the Canadian corporate sector. It begins with the question: Exactly how many major companies are being bought out by foreign competitors? Aside from the few high profile cases — Nexen, Tim Horton’s, Molson, The Bay, etc. — how common is this, really?
The Globe & Mail, aka the Daily Plagiarist, provides an answer. Every year since 1984, the Globe’s Report on Business has listed Canada’s top 1000 publicly traded companies, and a varying number of its top privately held companies, by profit and revenue. Unfortunately I don’t have the early lists, but I have been given access to the 1996 list, and have started putting it into a spreadsheet. This will mark the beginning of a major project to explore the answers to the question I asked in the first paragraph.
I’ve only just got started, but the numbers for the top 100 companies by profit, which had gross revenues ranging from around $300 million to $25 billion, are revealing. In 1995, 7 of Canada’s top 100 companies were controlled by foreign multinationals. However, in 2012, 37 of those companies were now foreign-owned.
Which is to say that in the last 17 years, one in three of the country’s largest corporations has been taken over by foreign interests. This includes a few countries that went bankrupt and had their remains snatched up by outside companies, like Nortel, but most of the takeovers were mergers of still-apparently-solvent companies by foreign multinationals.
Let the Great Canadian Fire-Sale continue.
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Moira Law
We need to nationalize the Canadian petroleum industry.
Derek
Out of the top 10 nation’s in terms of global output of petroleum products. Canada (3rd largest producer) has no national program.
Great leadership on that front.
76% of petroleum resources are owned by foreign companies.
Meaning, . . .
…not a chance Canadians will have a say in the matter of how our resources are exploited for fear of NAFTA, FIPA style corporate responses.
Rab
I don’t think it really matters who owns a company. It’s not like the shareholders have the best interest of average Canadians at heart.
Maybe before “free trade” a Canadian company might have been less cold-hearted, although I doubt it. Regardless, now that we have a “level playing field” it’s every man for himself.
Countries that have a relative advantage in trade, like for instance paying workers subsistence level wages under horrendous conditions (ahem China cough), will see more jobs while other countries will lose jobs, or else see jobs transformed from high paying manufacturing to low-pay-service-part-time-crap.
US saw 4.2 Million jobs created since September 2009, of which 3.5 Million went to people aged 55 or older. These are people who would have been looking at retirement 10 years ago, before their house price imploded and their investment income went to zero thanks to Fed policy. But the bankers got their bonuses, thank God.
Bloomberg article today mentions firings highest since 2010, but also mentions many foreign companies hiring Americans…for Call Centre staffing!
Oh yeah, another thing on free trade. Beyond harmonizing our economy with US, Energy is a big deal. Under the agreement we can never reduce the quantity of energy products we send to the US. So in the event that global prices pop, we would not be able to utilize Canadian energy resources to subsidize standards of living.
Anyway, bottom line to me is Companies will do what they do, and it doesn’t matter where the assholes at the top have their primary residence.
Sixth Estate
It does matter when it comes to taxing or regulating them.
Admittedly not much of an issue under the present government, but it will be one in the future, including with respect to energy.
jrkrideau
@ Rab.
You forgot cough, cough, the USA as a low wage state. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505144_162-57415828/research-shows-the-us-is-a-low-wage-country/.
Sixth Estate
Ten years from now, the US will probably be a normal wage state.
Until the 1980s, citizenship was considered a thing of great value. It is now being systematically devalued.
The Sixth Estate » Hollowing Out, Part 2: Who Buys Canadian Companies?
[...] Last time, in my new Hollowing Out series, I began taking a look at the Globe & Mail’s list of Canada’s largest 1000 companies back in 1996. (This list is not freely available online to my knowledge, so I cannot link to it.) I found that around 30% of the largest 100 companies on that list had since been sold to foreign interests — a ratio I thought was fairly disturbing, although not nearly as bad as it could have been or, indeed, as bad as some people have been led to believe. [...]