The Oldest Company In The World
No company can survive forever. In fact, 60 percent of businesses fail within 3 years. Those that last usually collapse within a few generations. It is incredibly rare for a business to live on for more than a century. But the oldest company in the world is actually more than a thousand years old.
As it happens, the five oldest companies in the world are all Japanese. What this says about Japanese culture I’m not sure, but it certainly speaks to how old that country is. Three of those five are hotels and none of them are especially large or profitable.
Oldest Company In The World
Kongō Gumi is a construction company that was founded some time around the year 580 AD. For more than 1400 years it has been in continuous operation. Amazingly it has remained a family run firm, being passed through the hands of a single family for 40 generations! This is partly due to a Japanese custom where son in laws who marry daughters of the family will actually adopt her name. This may sound funny to westerns but in Japan it’s a common practice. It now becomes clear why so many of the oldest companies in the world are Japanese. In most other nations the ownership of businesses could only pass through sons, at least until quite recently.
Kongō Gumi specializes in building traditional Buddhist temples. It’s the kind of project that is always in demand, Japan having a large Buddhist population. Slowly but steadily, Kongō Gumi prospered in the backdrop of Japanese history. While huge corporations grew and fell with the emergence of Japan as a modern nation state, Kongō Gumi carried on doing what they always have.
Only in the mid 2000s did the company run into trouble. With the need for new religious temples waning and the cost of materials rising, it looked as if Kongō Gumi would finally run out of luck. So in 2006 the Kongō family finally sold the company. It still exists, and still builds temples — but is a subsidiary of the Takamatsu Construction Group.
Oldest Company In America
It may surprise you to hear that the oldest company in America is actually Turkish. Founded in 1623, the Avedis Zildjian Company relocated to the USA in the 1900s. Zildjian make and sell instruments like cymbals, and other equipment for drummers. It is the world’s largest producer of cymbals and drumsticks. The founder of the company was an alchemist, who hoped to find a way of transforming ordinary metals into gold. During his experiments he found new ways of creating alloys that ring out perfectly when struck as a musical instrument. It was not long before the Sultan of the Turkish Ottoman Empire hired him to create cymbals for military marching bands. This did not necessarily make him fabulously wealthy, but did grant him and his family access to the Sultan’s inner circle.
His descendants carried on the tradition, the practice of metal working being passed down from father to son. The quality of metal alloys and instruments became legendary across Europe and beyond. As the centuries ticked by the Zildjian family achieved the kind of prestige only generations of success can bring. But then in the early 1900s everything fell apart. The Zildjian family are ethnically Armenian. That might not sound like a bad thing but in the late Ottoman Empire there was a lot of persecution of Armenians. Countless innocent people were murdered, arrested, and forced out of influential positions in society. Some members of the Zildjian family were personally persecuted, including one who was linked to a plot to assassinate the Sultan. He and many others were forced to leave the empire, setting up new factories abroad.
A New Chapter
By 1929 the company had relocated to the United States, run by a new line of inheritance within the Zildjian family. America even then was known as the land of opportunity. But without the glistening reputation and large factories they once had in Europe, the Zildjian now had to start over. What they did have was a family culture of metallurgy going back more than 10 generations — and a secret recipe to produce the perfect alloys for musical instruments. So in retrospect we can see it was only a matter of time before the Avedis Zildjian Company rebuilt their empire.
Yet the strategy they employed was very intelligent. Identifying rising stars within the jazz genre, they approached drummers and created custom cymbals to suit their specific needs. This more than anything got the ball rolling, with their masterful alloys now associated with some of America’s hottest performers.
Then in the 1960s with the rise of Rock music, the demand for sturdy cymbals that could take a good pounding exploded. Even the Beatles were seen using Zildjian equipment. This in turn inspired smaller bands to buy their products, and music stores to stock Zildjian as their premier supplier. That is how the Avedis Zildjian Company regained all they had lost and more.
Today the company is still controlled by the Zilfjian family, who still keep their alloy recipes secret from the world. It might not be the oldest company in the world, but having continuously existed since the early 17th century, I’d say they’re doing pretty well.
