Survivors: A tentative mapping of centenarian firms around the world

Abstract

Despite the relevance that the business longevity topic has taken in managerial studies over the last years, there is a lack of cross-country and cross-industry studies on business survival. Namely, there have not been concrete attempts to map long-lived companies still in operation on a global scale. In this direction, this paper aims to census firms that survived over at least 100 years worldwide, whatever their size or branch of industry. The research allowed the authors to discover the countries and the industries in which centenarian firms are most concentrated and to investigate their characteristics, such as their size or the year of their foundation. This research is the first step of a more complex and ambitious project directed to shed light on key factors of business longevity and explain the survival capacity of long-lived firms in response to rapid change in markets and society