This is not a very meaningful list. They just take these companies' word about when they were "founded." Often all that means is that there was someone in the same place doing the same thing. It doesn't imply any kind of organizational continuity.
There's something by Douglas Adams on matter & partical & energy & wave-particle functions and stuff.
He reckoned that 'stuff' is overrated, that of all the atoms that made up ksvs 10 years ago, virtually none make him/her up now. Whatever it is that you think you are, it's not the stuff you're made of.
This is a cool article but perhaps inaccurate data - the Wikipedia article on the oldest companies in the world has a many entries that this article is missing.
Apparently the author of the article did not read it before writing the title. It is a list of the 100 oldest family businesses. From the first paragraph:
"Below there's a list of world's top 100 oldest companies that represent family business."
The book Peopleware has a statement about an old company that stuck in my mind for years as it's such a haunting image:
The few remaining employees of the Dutch East India Company (founded in 1651 and once the largest company in the world) now spend forty hours a week filling out paperwork...
If this were true, they'd belong around #45 on the list. However, I once heard DeMarco and Lister (the authors) give a talk. Afterwards I went up to DeMarco and told him I'd always remembered that story and was wondering where they had gotten it, since they hadn't given a reference.
He looked at me for a second and said, "Did we say that?" I assured him they did. He paused again and said, "Huh. Usually we only make stuff up for our talks, not our books!"
(I don't have the book anymore, but the quote helpfully comes up in Google book search: http://books.google.com/books?q=peopleware+dutch+east. I had to add the last two words from memory, so they're just a paraphrase.)
The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602 and was the first to issue stock. The company ended in 1798 when the government took over the company after it went into decline predominantly due to wars with Britain and France.
It's a very interesting list. I would like to learn more about the old Japanese firms listed.
As some of the comments accompanying that article noted, they did not mention the Hudson Bay Company, which was incorporated in 1670 and still operates. But they did claim to limit themselves to listing family firms.
It would be interesting to know if Japanese, Chinese, or Korean businessman had joint stock companies or something similar before they came about in Europe. I think the Chinese first did paper money. I read somewhere that Koreans have some ancient and sophisticated "lending club" tradition that may be the oldest expression of the idea of interest -- it is some sort of scheme whereby each member pays in a small fee each week, and a certain member receives all the money each week, determined by some formula.
The (former) Swedish forestry company Stora Kopparberg would have been no. 5-9 on the list if they hadn't merged with a Finnish company in 1998. "Stora was, by one count, the oldest existing corporation or limited liability company in the world. Originally known as Stora Kopparberg, it was granted a charter from King Magnus IV of Sweden in 1347. The first share in the company is however dated already in 1288 and mining in the mountain had started possibly much earlier."
The oldest one I had heard of was Zildjian (the cymbal maker) which dates from 1623. And they say Web 2.0 companies can't last with unpronounceable names!
