Ever since people were able to express their opinions publicly, as in, via the Internet, the life as we know it ceased to exist. Every single day you’re being told that the world is about to end in 9 days (it won’t, stop freaking out), that the aliens are going to invade next Tuesday (they won’t), etc.
The Internet also taught you that it doesn’t take much to set people off. And to be honest, it really doesn’t. Well, so did the 10 companies on this list. They realized how to set people off with their products and use it to their advantage. And you had no idea they were doing it…
Nestlé
Most of the products that you buy are owned by a surprisingly small number of monopolistic companies. Take Nestlé, for example… They own over 8,500 different brands in 80 countries. We know you heard of Aero, Kit Kat, Milky Bar, etc. But then there are some products that you probably never imagined would be owned by the chocolate giant, such as Purina Pet Food, Hot Pockets, Gerber Baby Food, Shredded Wheat…
They also own approximately 23% of cosmetic powerhouse L’Oréal, who itself owns huge brands like Garnier, Maybelline, and The Body Shop. Nestlé is not the only food company whose reach is greater than you think. Kellogg’s owns big brands Eggo, Pringles, and Cheez-It. PepsiCo owns Quaker Oatmeal, Cheetos, and Tropicana.
So, how have Nestlé used their massive clout?
Well, not always for good. In 2013, the company was accused of depriving locals in a small Pakistani community of water by repurposing their local well for their bottled water production company ‘Pure Life’.
Lockheed Martin
With global military expenditure standing at over $1.5 trillion every year, it’s no surprise that companies producing and supplying weapons exert a huge amount of power over world events. Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest weapons manufacturer. They employ 126,000 people and rake in $69.3 billion a year in profit.
National militaries around the world rely on Lockheed. For example, it’s the United States’ largest government contractor, receiving 10% of the Pentagon’s funds. They also supply weapons to Germany, India, Israel, Japan, the UK and numerous other countries, showing the wide-reaching extent of their influence over worldwide conflicts.
However, Lockheed Martin’s control has spread beyond this. They spend a great deal of money on lobbying, especially in America, investing approximately $10 million a year into this. They tend to offer their financial support to political candidates who advocate higher national defense spending, in order to ensure more investment in their own products. Clever, isn’t it?
Quanta Computer Inc.
PC vs. Mac has been one of the biggest rivalries of the technological age. When buying a laptop, a lot of people have strong loyalties to one the other. And it’s a battle that shows no signs of dying down anytime soon. But, at the end of the day, does it really matter? Macs, Dells, HPs, Sonys, Toshibas, all these laptops come from the same manufacturer – Quanta Computer Inc.
Quanta is a Taiwan-based manufacturer of notebook computers and other electronic hardware, which was founded in 1988. With approximately 70% of adults in the Western World owning a laptop, this equates to a simply gigantic reach for Quanta.
It has also grown beyond laptop production and now has fingers in many other technological pies. Quanta has influence in mobile communication, GPS systems, and home entertainment.
They even collaborated with Facebook back in 2011 as part of the Open Compute Project, which aimed to create more efficient servers, storage and data center hardware design.
InBev
It’s no secret that alcohol plays a big role in society. 56% of American adults questioned in a 2015 National Survey admitted to drinking in the past month. An estimated 88,000 people die from alcohol-related causes every year and excessive drinking costs the health service a whopping $223.5 billion a year.
With such a variety of tipples available, you would expect the responsibility for alcohol consumption to fall onto a large number of different companies. But there is actually one company that has a huge monopoly over the beer industry – InBev. It owns 46% of the beer market in America and has a net profit of $3.4 billion a year.
In fact, most of the beers you can in stores belong to the InBev beer empire, including Stella Artois, Budweiser, Beck’s and Corona. InBev also has majority stakes in other huge companies such as Grupo Modelo, which makes most of the beers in Mexico. Basically, whenever you’re buying beer, there’s a strong likelihood that your money will at some point end up in InBev’s pocket.
Pfizer
The industry for painkillers, antibiotics and vitamin supplements is currently booming, with experts estimating that the global pharma market will reach $1.12 trillion by 2022. This basically puts a large proportion of the world’s population under the thumb of the planet’s big pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer.
It’s the largest research-based drugmaker in the world, with its products marketed in more than 150 countries. The company, therefore, has a lot of control over millions of people’s well-being, a responsibility that they handled questionably in 2016. The drug giant was fined over $100 million for illegally hiking up the price of the anti-epilepsy drug by 2,600% overnight.
This directly affected how much the UK’s National Health Service had to pay and stripped 50,000 people of potentially life-saving medication. The production of drugs is the company’s primary source of revenue, but Pfizer’s worldwide control doesn’t stop there.
They are behind numerous well-known healthcare products such as Listerine and Sudafed, as well as being a massively influential player in the animal health industry.
Pearson
Pearson is one of the biggest publishers of educational material in the world. despite being based in London 60% of its sales go to the United States, and it operates in more than 70 countries. The company owns numerous educational publishing giants, such as Penguin, Harcourt and Prentice Hall.
Its influence over the American education system is so great that, theoretically, you could be taking Pearson-designed tests from kindergarten through to 8th grade. You could study a Pearson-designed curriculum, using Pearson-published textbooks and be taught by teachers certified by a Pearson test.
And with such monopoly over the education sector, Pearson have been able to hike up prices without anyone really being able to stop them. Over the past few decades, the cost of textbooks have increased arguably more than any other aspect of education – including college tuition.
According to the Huffington Post, textbook prices have increased a whopping 812% in the last 30 years, allegedly due to reduced competition brought about by Pearson’s monopoly.
ICBC
Bankers are ultimately responsible for stabilizing the economy, which ripples through every aspect of our lives. Their power influences everything from the big-scale decisions of governments, to the prices of individual food items in your fridge. If you combined the wealth of the world’s 10 largest banks, you’d have $25.1 trillion – which would be enough to fund the US government for more than 7 years.
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China is without a doubt the most powerful bank in the world. It has over $3 trillion in assests and a market value of $215.6 billion, meaning it reigns supreme at the top of Forbes’ “World’s Biggest Public Companies” list.
And the bank’s influence isn’t limited to China alone. ICBS has a foothold in every continent except Antarctica. They employ nearly half a million people globally. They have also extended their control by turning other major banks into ICBC subsidiaries, such as Turkey’s TekstilBank and South Africa’s Standard Bank.
Monsanto
Monsanto is the American giant which specializes in agricultural biotechnology. It is estimated to be worth a huge $65 billion. It has nearly complete control over the American seed market. For example, they trademark nearly 80% of the corn grown in the country. This might not sound like the most influential monopoly in the world, but corn is actually an integral ingredient in a surprisingly large number of products.
Corn, corn syrup, and cornstarch show up in gas, glue, makeup, soap, toothpaste, aspirin, diapers and even the numble house brick. Despite its impresievly diverse market influence, Monsanto has established a troubling reputation. It was described by “Modern Farmer” magazine as the ‘face of corporate evil’.
This is, in part, due to its controversial use of GM crops, but also largely the result of their ruthless treatment of competitors. In the 1990s, rumors emerged that the company had produced so-called ‘terminator seeds’ designed to sterilize the plants of anyone who tried to patent Monsanto seeds gathered from neighboring farms.
Disney
Over the years, The Walt Disney Company has acquired a few high-profile movie production companies. Most notably, there were purchases of Marvel Entertainment in 2009 and Lucasfilm in 2012, both of which cost over $4 billion.
More than half of the highest grossing movies over the last ten years were owned by the company, showing how tight their grip over the film world is. And, while Disney are best known for their billion-dollar grossing movies and their world-famous theme parks, the mass media giant’s reach doesn’t stop there.
Disney also own, or partly own, a load of other companies. They own TV networks ABC, ESPN and The History Channel. With the media playing an incomparable role when it comes to public sentiment and knowledge, Disney’s vast empires makes one of the most powerful companies in the world.
Alphabet Inc
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Google regularly tops Forbes’ list of the most valuable brands in the world, with a reported revenue of $50.6 billion in 2016. Over 40,000 search queries are made on Google every single second and YouTube has a reach of well over a billion users, which is almost a third of all people on the Internet.
With its algorithms determining what we see online and what information we have access to, the control it exerts over our daily lives is arguably unmatched by any other company. But did you know that Google is actually owned by another, lesser-known company – Alphabet Inc?
Alphabet Inc. was founded in 2015 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the two founders of Google. So, in a nutshell, Google has spun off from Google and renamed itself Alphabet which now owns Google. The point of Alphabet Inc. as a new umbrella company is to separate Google’s core Internet business from some of its more ambitious, diverse projects.
So the services we all know and love as part of Google, YouTube, Chrome, Android and Google Maps, are not going to be put at risk by the company’s new ventures. Such ventures include research company The X Lab, which is developing driverless cars, and the Calico life extension project.
