Are those supermarkets really all that French or Belgian anymore?
In practice, many large companies are owned by investors from all over the world looking for diversification.
In practice, many large companies are owned by investors from all over the world looking for diversification.
When foreign owners extract profits to recover their investment or pay whomever, wealth is in fact leaving the country - because they still own the capital (stores) yet get money back.
It's not clear cut based on this. They could have invested beyond price, brought knowledge, improved efficiency ... It's also possible they are in effect extracting wealth colonialist style, which is something to beware of - at scale it can have severe consequences for local economies.
If the interesting work all stays in the home country, how do you call that?
We like to kid ourselves that multinational companies are truly multinational, companies of the world. What's the percentage of non-American top managers, for example, working for American based multinationals? It's probably in the low 1-digit percentages.
There is a definite advantage to bejng an early investor. For these companies the risk is comparatively small and the rewards they reap are huge and on very long time horizons.
It's not super clear cut that it's all nationalist BS.
As far as returning the earnings to workers and local economy via taxes - yes there are expenses, you can't take 100% of income as profits, but there is a lot of leeway to direct the funds pretty much wherever the company chooses. Corporate headquarters in tax friendly countries are popular for a reason.
When the company buys in Romania and lays of the local marketing, sales departments, etc to make things more efficient, uniform and streamlined that doesn't help the local economy. That makes things more efficient tho but as a Romanian you're left holding the bag.
Now everything is foreign owned and the streamlining and competition has played out in such a fashion that there's potentially less competition and consequently less benefits off competition. (see all the modern industries that have turned into duopolies, monopsonies or the like that can easily keep new competition from coming in but also don't compete enough to drive consumer prices down.
If push comes to shove, they will for sure prioritize French/German/Belgian interests.
Can't really blame them but strategically it's not a position you want to be in, looking at it from the other side.
In more general sense, all global companies have some originating country and most of them keep the HQ and most of the high-paying jobs there. They expand to other countries mostly as a cost-saving measure and they have zero loyalty to them, while they have a lot of loyalty to the mothership.
No, it makes perfect sense when you factor in that FIAT/FCA/Stellantis was and is the receiver of massive subsidies, in various guises, from the Italian state. Losing those would be more harmful to the business than losing any foreign factory (with the exception of US ones, which were also beneficiaries of massive state support). FCA stopped being a "national champion" ages ago, they are just a hardened global business now; they just know which side their bread is buttered.
> They expand to other countries mostly as a cost-saving measure and they have zero loyalty to them
Believe me, they have zero loyalty to "the motherland" too. Many of them have long relocated their HQ too, for fiscal reasons. FCA/Stellantis, for example, is now based in Amsterdam. The chance that they'll ever expand again their manufacturing bases in Italy or France is minimal.
Honestly, the issue is that national champions don't exist anymore. Greed-is-good is all that matters.
https://www.manager-magazin.de/unternehmen/handel/aldi-nord-...