What It represents to a country? The most intuitive answer to the question goes through their national emblems, flags, shields, anthems. We wouldn’t be wrong, but we wouldn’t be right either. There are countless more abstract elements, such as food, music or cinema, that also express the popular or artistic feeling of a nation. In parallel, there are individuals, athletes, politicians, thinkers, who project their country towards the rest of humanity. Culture, in short.
But also economy. It is hard to imagine South Korea without the influence of its family conglomerates, the chaebol, among which Samsung stands out. It is impossible to understand Saudi Arabia without Aramco, the company with the highest turnover and market capitalization in the world. On smaller scales, much of Sweden’s identity comes from its identification with Ikea, just as Nokia once came to represent Finland. In the midst of the capitalist era, the success or failure of a large company is also a source of national pride (or shame).
A good way to understand the reach of some companies within your home country is by exploring this map from VisualCapitalist. Based on data collected by Fortune, CompaniesMarketCap, TradingView, and MarketScreener, the authors have selected a representative company (the largest) for each country for which information is available. The results are sometimes striking, but in most cases predictable. Do youSpain? Your flag would be Inditex, evidently.
If we travel to North America we come across Apple (United States), Shopify (Canada), Ecopetrol (Colombia), Vale (Brazil), Enel (Chila) or Mercado Libre (Argentina). Some internationally recognized, some subsidiaries, others more national in scope. BHP dominates in Australia; Tencent, a tech giant, in China; Toyota has never gotten off the head of Japan; LVMH is as French a symbol as the baguette; while the very timely AstraZeneca it is imposed in the United Kingdom.
The scope of each company is marked by the color in which they appear on the map: blue for technology companies, pink for the consumer industry, green for financial services and beige for raw materials, among others.
Here can be viewed in high resolution.