This is a special project that I naively took up one week ago.

It turned up that it used up more time than I expected. The result? 392 (instead of 394, my mistake. Missing numbers 66 & 84 as you may see) companies that are founded before 1909 and are still listed in today’s context. The accuracy of the data, I must say, is limited to that in the Wikipedia. I started off, thinking that it’s a simple task of collecting the data from Wikipedia (since it already has the tags available for quick access). Along the way, I realized one bad point about Wikipedia: there is really no consistent format for company information. Everyone is trying to conform to some standard but ends up to be different. This added unnecessary work for me. There could be errors in the tags as well. Thus, I have to double check if the company is really founded in that particular year and if there is any repetition. However, putting it altogether, the task won’t be possible without Wikipedia. It’s some extra work that needs to be done, that’s all.

I try to put the companies in the chronological order; starting with the oldest company I can find from Wikipedia. There are some limitations for sure. First of all, it will be my searching capabilities in Wikipedia and my familiarity to the “system”. Secondly, I found that US companies are the most in the pack. This could be the truth but also could be due to the fact that most writers for Wikipedia come from US itself. Thirdly, though I have stated clearly the definitions for the list, there are still gray areas as to which company should qualify. Many companies have changed names along the way. Some even merged and de-merged with others. Key is that the management, culture or know-how of the company was passed on and the people running them are truly from the same background. But this is subjective and that’s why I didn’t include this in the definitions.

Having made the disclaimer, I should say I am quite proud of this effort. It fulfill my wish to know more about century old companies and perhaps, perform more in-depth analysis later. It’s amazingly large in numbers. 394 is almost close to Fortune’s 500. I believe there are certainly more out there and 500 might be poor estimation. Nevertheless, this laid a great foundation for more work to come… :-)

In any case, you are free to let me know of your opinions such as what company should be out or in. Your help to strengthen the list will be greatly appreciated. At the same time, please don’t be discouraged if your opinions are not accepted. The list is still available for download and you may make it the way you like it. Here is one example.

Here is an update for 2010. As I am a bit tied up to produce more convenient views of these companies, I would recommend this page from Wikipedia, “List of oldest companies” if you are interested more than just listed, public companies.