How large should companies be allowed to get

Soldato
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A video on Wimp the other day made me think that it's not good to have one comapny controlling soo many things and it might be better to restrict how many fingers a company is allowed to stick into how many pies!
In fact I thought there was some sort of "fair competition" law in place to stop companies from "taking over the world"..... :D

http://www.wimp.com/biggestcompany/


awaits crys of conspiracy from Magik
 
The question starts from a false premise, it assumes that there is a point where a company is too big and that the state can somehow know what this point is correctly.
 
Plenty of regulation out there already to do with monopolies, however, you can still encounter some problems in certain sectors.
 
The size of the company is irrelevant and not necessarily a problem. Creating a monopoly is a problem. It doesn't matter if a company is gigantic and has diversified interests covering many sectors, so long as there exist viable competitors within those sectors.
 
I don't think there should be a limit to a companys' growth.

However I would argue that in an ideal world there should be absolutely no place in society for privately run prisons or schools.
 
I don't think there should be a limit to a companys' growth.

However I would argue that in an ideal world there should be absolutely no place in society for privately run prisons or schools.

why exactly?

If one country ran every prison in the entire world, it would cost a heck of a lot more for the UK to run its own prisons than to have them run your prisons as they'd be buying all the necessary equipment, from riot shields, to sporks, in such massive bulk, from the cheapest places in the world, if not building it all themselves.

Why would a locally run prison run better than one run by better experienced people, or cost less, or somehow be bad in any way at all.

Yes, in a film they might brainwash every prisoner and released a couple hundred million prisoners worldwide to take over every country, however chances of that are pretty remote.

Also according to that info, 3billion turnover, considering the amount of things they are involved in, is VERY small, thats not profit, but turnover, they run a nuclear weapons program ffs, 3 billion turn over is almost laughable, although to be accurate its VERY likely their actual turnover is pretty much classified as you can be certain anything government, security won't be publically stated or announced and I simply can't imagine a company like that having that much turn over. Though it depends what you classify as turnover, they don't sell an awful lot, but get paid for providing services indirectly.
 
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so this company is sooo massive yet it's turnover is far less than ibms?

It's less than half of what Kingfisher plc brings in every year, let alone IBM.

I first heard of serco when I was a little kid and mad about model trains and Hornby released a set of serco logistics wagons. The person who made this video is a moron.
 
although to be accurate its VERY likely their actual turnover is pretty much classified as you can be certain anything government, security won't be publically stated or announced

What are you on about? Why would their financial results be classified? If anything they are more likely to NOT be classified since it's taxpayers money being spent. I'm sure their investors would be pleased about being given false full year results too.

How does Serco compare to GE? They are involved in a lot more than people would think.

David and Goliath. GE's turnover last year was $157 billion and they made more in profit than Serco's turnover.
 
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How does Serco compare to GE? They are involved in a lot more than people would think.

Well they make a lot more money;

Net Income
GE: US$10.7 Billion
Serco: £130.2 million

and have more employees;

GE: 304,000
Serco: 70,000

Edit- As above, David and Goliath.
 
although to be accurate its VERY likely their actual turnover is pretty much classified as you can be certain anything government, security won't be publically stated or announced

As they are a listed company on the FTSE wouldn't hiding their turnover be illegal?
 
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