The OECD has just (it seems) begun promoting a dataset it has on multinational corporations. One indicator it publishes on the 500 company is it surveys is the number of jurisdictions they can be found in.
I stress, that the 500 are not all multinational corporations, by a long way. Why the 500 were chosen is not clear.
I could not resist a quick data resort. These are the most geographically diversified companies in the dataset (top 50 shown):
And these are the UK companies in the dataset (in total, ranked by the number of countries they are present in):
And I bet you don't know what Linde plc does...
Now you might see why we need country-by-country reporting. Without it we cannot know very much about a great deal of what goes on within these companies, most especially when a comparison between the number of companies reported on in the financial statements and the actual number of locations in which the entity is present is considered. Look at Alphabet on that one, if you will..... (which is Google, for those unfamiliar with the name of its parent company).
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I do know what Linde does (they bought BOC).
What I found most interesting about the GB list is the high degree of congruence in the majority of cases between the number of jurisdictions reported and the number with a presence.
I wonder how those with discrepancies would explain it – BP, AstraZeneca, Rio Tinto, RELX (Reed Elsevier and LexisNexis), RBS, Diageo, Lloyds Bank. Some of these will have been making country by country reports for several years anyway, under the EU rules for extractive businesses and for the banking sector. Do they only mention jurisdictions in their annual reports of they are material to the business as a whole?
And how do the ones with big gaps on the other list explain that – Alphabet, Deutsche Post, Coca-Cola, BMW, Visa, etc (compared to the heroes of openness and transparency, such as BAT, Nestle, Orange, Dell, Marriott, etc).
More research is needed…
I suspect it will happen
But not by me
Linde? Well I have a number of gas containers in my camper van. Calor Propane and Camping Gaz are the two i use most but you can’t get replacements for them in Norway so i have a Linde container for that. Sadly, there are no ferries to Norway any more so getting there is a problem. Now, i wonder, will it be cost effective to restart ferries to Norway after the worst of this is over? We used the ferries to Goteborg (1982-2000) and to Stavanger (2001-2008) but in the latter years lorry drivers were telling us that with the price of diesel it was getting cheaper to drive from Scandinavia to Britain.
We have had Linde as a customer for maps over the years. It is in reality still a German company and the HQ is in Germany whatever the Irish brass plate might say:
Linde plc is an Irish-domiciled multinational chemical company formed by the merger of Linde AG of Germany and Praxair of the United States. It is the world’s largest industrial gas company by market share as well as revenue. Linde shares are traded in Germany and the United States, and included in those countries’ DAX 30 and S&P 500 major stock market indices.
If they took over BoC then this is really another example of the demise of UK major companies. Go back 30 years and there was ICI, BoC, Cadbury, Rowntree, the glass people in St Helens, Eveready, Dunlop, GEC, Marconi, Plessey etc etc. All gone via takeovers and asset strippers. Most of these mergers should never be allowed, especially if you believe Adam Smith was right since he specified no player in ‘the market’ should be big enough to have any control or leverage over it. Clearly when you have companies with 10, 20 or more percent then it is very far from a Smith ‘invisible hand’.
Well said
Not knowing what Linde do, I looked them up on Wikipedia, and thought – is this a British company? The head office brass plate may be here, but what else? Same for Aon. And doubtless several of the others as well if I could bother to look. And since when was NV a British company abbreviation? After flag of convenience, address of convenience…
I think the OECD is using a FTSE quotation as indication…..
I think…..
Linde plc is incorporated in Ireland and listed in New York and Frankfurt. It does not have a London listing. But its SEC regulatory filings do say its “principal executive offices” are in Guildford.
(BOC was founded by two Frenchmen, and expanded using technology licenced from Linde. Linde recently merged with Praxair, which was spun out of Linde some years ago.)