America’s corporate giants are getting harder to topple

livemint.com:

The Economist has examined the age of each firm, taking into account the mergers and spin-offs that paint an artificially youthful picture of the group. We found that only 52 of the 500 were born after 1990, our yardstick for the internet era. That includes Alphabet, Amazon and Meta, but misses Apple and Microsoft, middle-aged tech titans.

Merely seven of the 500 were created after Apple unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, while 280 predate America’s entry into the second world war (see chart 1). In fact, the rate at which new corporate behemoths arise has been slowing. In 1990 just 66 firms in the Fortune 500 were 30 years old or younger and since then the average age has crept up from 75 to 90.

One explanation is that the digital revolution has not been all that revolutionary in some parts of the economy, notes Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School. Communications, entertainment and shopping have been turned on their heads. But extracting oil from the ground or sending electricity down wires look mostly the same.

High-profile flops like WeWork, a much-hyped office-sharing firm now at risk of collapse, and Katerra, a failed one-time unicorn that tried to redefine the construction business by using prefabricated building components and fewer middlemen, have discouraged others from trying to disrupt their respective industries. Another reason is that inertia has slowed the pace of competitive upheaval in many industries, buying time for incumbents to adapt to digital technologies. Although 65% of Americans now bank online, nearly all the banks they use are ancient—the average age of those in the Fortune 500, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, is 138.