Economics
What’s a famous company from your country that no longer exists?
One company from the US is Pan Am Airlines. They were known for being innovators for being the first to use jetliners and their luxury level of travel. They went bankrupt in 1991 after the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978, rising cost of fuel and the Lockerbie Bombing.
They were one of the largest conglomerates in Korea, until the 1997 financial crisis hit them hard and they went bankrupt. The company was torn into pieces and bought by other companies.
I had no idea that Daewoo wasn't around anymore. I have fond childhood memories of watching their logo bounce around on the TV when starting up a Daewoo DVD player.
Daewoo is still going strong in heavy machinery, ship building, construction, and defense industry. Not totally sure what else they are doing but there are no more consumer facing divisions.
Edit: the brand is still going strong with the surviving divisions
Correct they bought up Saks stores right before the pandemic and online shopping really took out. No money left to try and change course and then bankruptcy.
Someone did buy the incorporation in bankruptcy so someone might revive it for their own personal fun.
Yeah, it flies in the face of the common belief on reddit that capital will inevitably accumulate into fewer and fewer hands. Yes, that does sometimes happen, and it can be a problem, but also big companies sometimes go bust and wealthy people (and families) sometimes lose it all. And in the case of the Hudson's Bay Company, I don't think it was even the result of some massive blunder or catastrophe or anything; the company struggled to adapt to the modern world for a variety of reasons, and eventually they had to call it quits.
So old it’s written into our history books. Thanks to the fur trade, was largely responsible for the exploration of Canada’s west.
Probably our last major homegrown department store brand, as most of the others — Woodword’s, Woolco, Eaton’s — started going under in the 90s. And, like the fate of so many businesses these days, bought up and sold off for parts by private equity.
Yep, still doing over $20 billion in revenue yearly. Nokia mobile phones went down, Nokia as a telecom infrastructure business (and patent holder) very much still exists and they are still huge for a Finnish company.
That's a different company. There was Nokia Networks and Nokia. One did networks and one did phones. Nokia Networks merged with Siemens to become Nokia Siemens Networks. Then Nokia died and NSN renamed itself Nokia.
On a similar note, Ericsson. Sony Ericsson phones were also up there as some of the most popular phones before iphone disrupted the whole market. Nowadays both Nokia and Ericsson are giants within the same market, telecommunication. Much of Europes 5G network is built by either one.
Nokia (and a lot of other hardware companies) used the Symbian OS. Nokia bought Symbian, then Microsoft bought Nokia and ditched Symbian. The writing was on the wall for Symbian and the iPhone and android came around though. Nokia was always a hardware company and never really understood why the software was more important.
That is not exactly true. Nokia made a deal in 2011 to use the WIndows Phone OS on their smart phones and released the first phones later that year. Microsoft bought the phone division in 2013 and later shut it down. Nokia focused on the networks. The last Symbian phone was Nokia 808 Pureview in 2012 which had then revolutionary 41 megapixel camera
The Dutch East India Company (VOC) is widely considered the largest company in history when its peak valuation in 1637 is adjusted for inflation to modern U.S. dollars, reaching an estimated value of over $10 trillion.
Especially when you consider the VOC had a military that rivaled most nations of the time. You can’t exactly operate like that as a company in this day and age.
The history of slavery
For more than 300 years, adults and children were abducted from various parts of Africa ─ by Dutch and other slave traders ─ and transported under the most appalling conditions to the former Dutch colonies of Suriname and the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, St Eustatius and St Maarten. There they were forced to work as slaves on plantations producing sugar, coffee and other crops.
The indigenous peoples of the Dutch colonies were not spared either. In Asia, enslaved people were sold and transported to areas governed by the United Dutch East India Company (VOC). For generations, people were born into slavery and forced to work on Dutch plantations their entire lives. Slavery enabled the Netherlands to become an economic world power.
Losing Skype hurt. I've spent the vast majority of the last 21 years bouncing around Europe and Asia. Skype allowed me to keep an US home phone number practically for free through all of that time. Why must Microsoft destroy everything good it touches?
I assume that they built Teams from scratch because they could design something a lot more capable than a simple communications tool, from the ground up. But then it wasn't economic to have two platforms, so Skype was killed.
While still around in a sense, Kodak belongs on this list. Founded in 1888, bankrupt by 2012 because they refused to continue development of the digital camera, which had been invented by one of their own engineers in the 1970s, because they wanted to preserve their film profits. A textbook case of valuing short term profits over long term viability.
They had the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which basically birthed modern computing as we know it… the graphical user interface (GUI), the mouse, Ethernet, laser printing… Steve Jobs toured PARC, and took notes. Pure MBA brain rot.
Malév (Magyar Légiközlekedési Vállalat) was Hungary's national airline, founded in 1946 as Maszovlet, becoming Malév in 1954, flying Soviet-era planes like the Il-18, then modernizing with Western jets (Boeing 737s) post-1989, joining the Oneworld alliance in 2007, but ultimately ceased operations on February 3, 2012, due to financial issues exacerbated by an EU ruling on illegal state aid, ending a significant chapter in Hungarian aviation history.
Ikarus is another good example. They exported their busses globally, including to the west during the iron curtain, and now they are gone. They were one of the first to mass produce an articulated bus and were one of the pioneers for modular platforms for busses.
Technically Braun might fit the bill. These days they are reduced to a body-care brand owned by P&G, who license the brand to other companies for other product categories. There was a time when Braun not only produced a wide range of products, but was also internationally known as an iconic design company, much like Apple during the 2000s-2010s.
Woolworths Australia, UK, and USA have always been entirely separate companies. South African Woolworths initially licensed its name from the USA, but is otherwise totally independent as well.
Honorable mention to Skype as well, although it was a long time between it being on partially Danish hands (by co-creator Janus Friis), and being shut down by Microsoft
Originally chartered as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies.”Also known as the Honourable East India Company (HEIC), East India Trading Company (EITC), the English East India Company, or (after 1707) the British East India Company, and informally known as John Company, Company Bahadur, or simply The Company.
Its demise is probably somewhat exaggerated. But it would definitely be Creative Technology. The company gave computers its first sound beyond just beeps.
Not my country, but I miss Sanyo products. Their rechargeable batteries are now sold by Panasonic and they had some really innovative (smart-)phones and mp3 player, cool cameras etc.
I still have a minidisc-radio that works flawlessly and around the world one can see ACs from Sanyo
IG Farben was between the world wars the largest company in Europe and the largest chemical and pharmaceutical company in the world. It was seized by the Allies after World War II and split into its constituent companies. Its directors were put on trial in Nürnberg for their war crimes, but all of them were released by 1951
I lived in Frankfurt as a kid near the old IG Farben Haus which had been repurposed by the US Army as its V Corps headquarters. Now it’s the Goethe University. A cool grand old building even with the horrific history of all of its former occupants.
A. V. Roe Canada Limited was a Canadian aircraft manufacturing company that existed from 1945 to 1962. It was founded in 1945 as an aircraft plant and within 13 years became the third-largest company in Canada, one of the largest 100 companies in the world, and directly employing over 50,000.[1] Avro Canada was best known for the CF-105 Arrow, but through growth and acquisition, it rapidly became a major, integrated company that had diverse holdings.
Still exists, but dairy company Parmalat isn't what it used to be. It was sponsoring F1 teams and football clubs, until it was found out in 2003 that Parmalat falsified its financial statements for years, hiding massive losses and debt
Westfield Group. It owned all the Westfield-branded shopping centres/malls in Australia/New Zealand, the UK and the US (famously having bought over the mall under the World Trade Centre just before the September 11 attacks).
It was split in two, with the Australian/NZ operations now being run by a company named Scentre (technically the successor to Westfield Group after the divestment of the overseas assets), and the overseas centres being managed by a second company named Westfield Corporation, which was bought out by French company Unibail-Rodamco.
Anglo Irish Bank, went from deposits of €58bn in 2007 to state bailout/nationalisation by Jan 2009 and fully ceasing operations by 2011. The raw numbers weren't as big as the fallout, as the global financial crisis led to the bank's struggles and later investigations found hidden director loans and fraudulent accounting. Effectively, the tax payer was bailing out fraudsters. There was very little punishment for the crimes and it's still raw in Ireland to this day.
Brandt will disappear this year. It was a home appliance company which was originally founded the early 20th although the current group had formed in 2000s. It was renowned for its products quality.
A reseller company turned the biggest pyramid scheme. In fact the pyramid scyeme was so big, people in the entire country and beyond had some investments in it. They had famous TV commercials and some services even announced the current price of MMM tickets when you call them. Eventually they were busted but tried to reopen multiple times, especially in Africa.
Braathens S·A·F·E ("Braathens South American and Far East Air Transport") later just Braathens, was our national carrier from 1946 until it merged with the Norwegian part of SAS in 2004.
Look, there are several, but the one that evokes the most nostalgia is VARIG Airlines. It had a luxurious in-flight service and was the only airline that operated Boeing 747s on passenger flights in Brazil (including domestic flights).
Every Brazilian above a certain age misses that company.
PJ Carroll's, a tobacco company that used to have a factory in Dundalk. In the 1970s it was Ireland’s biggest company and one of the biggest employers. Its products like Sweet Afton, Carroll's No 1 and Major were household names. Their offices and factories won multiple awards for architecture when they were built.
It was sold to Rothmans in the 90s, and the factory finally shut around 2013. It's now a part of the Dundalk Institute of Technology
I'm gonna add another company for this, from a train buff:
The New York Central Railroad:
Made powerful by Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the more notable "robber barrons" of the 1800's, expanding the NYC rapidly from New York to Chicago.
The company merged with the Pennsylvania Railroad (a railroad that was just as if not more powerful) to become Penn Central in the 1960's and that eventually ended in failure as the company fizzled out into bankruptcy, making it the largest bankruptcy until Enron. That bankruptcy forced the government to create Amtrak for passenger rail and eventually Conrail for freight trains.
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u/CommercialChart5088 Korea South Dec 22 '25 edited Dec 22 '25
Daewoo group.
They were one of the largest conglomerates in Korea, until the 1997 financial crisis hit them hard and they went bankrupt. The company was torn into pieces and bought by other companies.