
Scotland vs Denmark: Global companies - Major_Grooves
http://wannabevc.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/scotland-vs-denmark-global-companies-fight/
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Theodores
Let's have a look at one product Scotland is famous for - Scotch Whisky, or
'Scotch' for short. Chances are that the first brands that you think of are
probably owned by Diageo, which has headquarters in London. Quite clearly
'Bell's' whisky is not English or a London thing, it is most definitely a
Scottish product.

Even when Scottish companies are not part of some giant multinational they are
likely to have a head office in London. The reasons for this are obvious -
London has things like a stock market.

You could probably make the same argument that this article proposes about
most of the states in the USA. Companies might operate in loads of states,
possibly all of them, and maybe have a brand image strongly associated to one
of them. Yet they could be owned by some mega-corporation that probably only
exists in somewhere like the Cayman Islands. Why doesn't Tennessee have any
global companies? Same deal as Scotland, with the famous 'Jack Daniels'
whiskey being made there but part of some company with headquarters elsewhere.
Is 'Jack Daniels' from Tennessee and a global brand? Yes. But a 'global
company', no.

Back to the article, in terms of pure GDP, Denmark is well ahead of Scotland.
They have better housing stock, better provision for things like benefits for
folk out of work, pensioners and those having children. There is a lot to
recommend Denmark. In terms of what matters, having 'global companies' is way
down the list as far as life in Scotland is concerned.

~~~
_delirium
The location of the main offices is part of the economic success of Denmark,
though. Copenhagen has a ton of white-collar office jobs in large part because
it's the headquarters of some multinational companies. This has helped Denmark
weather the transition from manufacturing and shipping by moving up the ladder
to "managers of manufacturing and shipping".

Maersk used to be a huge employer of Danish seamen and shipyard workers, for
example, but by now all its Danish shipyards have closed, and its ships are
not mainly staffed by Danes anymore either. Now its construction and shipping
operations are almost exclusively outside of Denmark (largely in Asia), but it
still contributes a huge pile of money to the Danish economy because the
"office" and logistics side of its global operations are largely run out of
Denmark. Carlsberg is somewhat similar: very little of it is _brewed_ in
Denmark anymore. The brewing is done in the Baltic countries, Poland, etc. But
the business side of things is headquartered in Denmark.

In Scotland's case, it seems like they still do some of the manufacturing, but
it's London that gets the HQs and the white-collar office jobs.

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lotsofmangos
Scotland has many small to medium companies that are global specialists that
few people notice outside their fields.

A couple of examples -

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTDI](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTDI)

[http://adrokgroup.com/](http://adrokgroup.com/)

~~~
arethuza
Standard Life, SSE, Weir Group, Stagecoach, Aggreko are home grown Scottish
companies that are pretty successful in their own area. And there are major
foreign owned operations like Sky, Total Upstream, Chevron North Sea...

~~~
arethuza
And some random other examples of newer rapidly growing brands:

Clothing - Bawbags ([http://www.bawbags.com/](http://www.bawbags.com/) \- with
their associated hurricane)

Brewing - Brewdog ([http://www.brewdog.com/](http://www.brewdog.com/))

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rdl
An interesting comparison might be to the 1800s, when Scotland was probably in
the top 20 nations of the world, at least in technology.

~~~
Major_Grooves
Why would that be an interesting comparison? Is it relevant to today?

