Map Chat: The Oldest Company in Every Country

How long can a business possibly stay open? Quite a long time as it turns out...

This was a fun map that I stumbled upon a few months ago. Originally created by BusinessFinancing.co.uk, it shows the oldest business in each country that is still open today color coded by the centuries that they first opened for business. You can learn more about their methodology as well as find additional maps on this subject on their website. It’s really quite remarkable the level of detail the map makers put into this map. Just finding all this data would be a huge undertaking. But as much as I love it, let’s break it down just a bit:

The Good

As I already mentioned the data here seems to be really good. I dug into their methodology a bit and whoever pulled this together put a lot of time and effort into ensuring that they could back up their data. And more than that, it’s fun data! Seeing where the oldest businesses are for each country and what the oldest businesses are in general just makes for some fun exploration. Who knew there were businesses from the year 800 still alive and kicking?

The Bad

Honestly, there’s not much to say that’s bad about this map. The worst thing you can say it that it’s just really busy. There’s a lot crammed of small text crammed onto a single map. The website did make individual continent maps which work better, in my opinion, for showing this level of data. This global map might have been better served just showing the color coding and perhaps the oldest company from each continent, or something like that.

The Lie

They’re working with pretty hard data (so long as their sources can be trusted) so the lie here is something bigger picture: what is considered a “business” at all? There are several postal services listed here for example. While postal services can be wholly private or wholly public, usually it’s a mix of both. Take the Singapore Post, for example, while today it’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Singtel (a telecommunications company), it started out as a part of the Singaporean military. Does that mean it was a business when it was part of the military? Maybe, depends on your perspective.