[crispy2000]

Interesting: "The country is currently home to more than 50,000 businesses that are over 100 years old. Of those, 3,886 have been around for more than 200 years. As a point of comparison, only one in every four U.S. companies founded in 1994 was still operating in 2004, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

The "point of comparison" is nothing of the kind. There's no indication of what ratio of new businesses in Japan survive their first 20 years. Look up survivor bias.

[mattbrewsbytes]

It should have been written as: "a point of comparison is that all US businesses aren't older than 239 years." And then something about what US businesses are older than 100.

They weren't really comparing anything.

[mburns]

Wikipedia lists 18 businesses in the US that have been operating since before 1776.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies_in_the...

[vacri]

Technically the businesses can be older, but they can't be "US businesses" for longer than the US existed. That doesn't take away from the spirit of your point, though.

[derefr]

I'm now very curious which companies have managed to survive major ownership changes in their nation-of-business, and whether there was continuity of management/shareholdership in those cases or not. Hong Kong would probably be pretty easy to study for that.

[bbanyc]

The Hudson's Bay Company used to be the owner of its nation-of-business (Rupert's Land, now western Canada). Today it's a department store chain in Canada and the parent company of two chains (Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue) in the US.

[culturestate]

The handover caused very little, if any, disruption to business in Hong Kong. The city still runs itself for all intents and purposes as an independent country, just with a new flag on the mast.

[derefr]

The most recent handover was minimal, yes. I'm more curious as to whether any single organization in Hong Kong existed prior to 1842 that still exists today, thus having survived two sovereignty changes.

[raverbashing]

For North America, this is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson%27s_Bay_Company

[davidw]

The history of Zildjian is interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avedis_Zildjian_Company

[aquadrop]

Even more so, they try comparing absolute numbers with ratio.

[barking]

reminds me of this http://i.imgur.com/gNefvUG.png

[Russell91]

This is exactly what I came here to say. Now I don't have to. It's hard for me to continue reading an article after reading such an obvious logical error.

[mc32]

It's a ridiculous article. I bet the author took one fact, that in Japan businesses occasionally are bequeathed to adult-adopted sons, took that and fleshed out an article around that and dressed it as a "change in banking attitudes leads to old companies going bankrupt".