I am just wondering why isn't there an AA World-Wide/City-Wide Drone Support Company in the likes of Lone Star and Knight Errant?

How would you create and/or run an AA World-wide/City-Wide Drone Support Company if you are the GM?

Cheers.

just to clarify, are you asking for a AA company to offer Drone support service to various cities to offer services similar to what LS and KE can offer?

Or are you wanting something else?

AA corps are vast multinationals that do not specialize on one field only. A multinational drone support company would be A-Rated.

And I'd run it as part of a Big Ten mega, to be honest.

It's probably not even A rated if it is that specialized. KE might be an A rated by themselves, but they do a lot more then fly drones.

Of course, the amount about how corporations actually work and are organized that the people who wrote up SR actually understood was very limited. For example, the focus on the CEOs in SR. I'll bet that almost nobody on Dumpshock could name the CEOs of the largest 10 corporations by revenue in the world without looking it up and not more then 10% of the members of Dumpshock could name any of the CEOs of top 5 corps by revenue without looking them up.

The actual diversity of a lot of large companies is amazing, but most of the really huge companies are very focused. However Oil and Gas Production has a lot more potential for huge revenues than does outsourced surveillance.

Unfair comparison. Most on Dumpshock could name several head of state or head of government of a "top 5" or "top 10" country IRL. On the other hand, few could name their SR counterpart in SR, mostly because it is rarely mentioned in the sourcebooks. The megacorporation replaced the nations as the primary power players, so it makes some sort of sense that we know the CEO.

Well, I assumed they do all things drone-related by themselves, including (possibly licensed) production, maintainance, productionn of RCCs and Riggerware, Pilot software and Autosofts, ect. But you're right, it's still a rather narrow focus.


The real celebrity CEOs are of popular (or infamous), not top-rated, corps. I'm pretty sure most dumpshockers could name the CEOs of Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft ... because they're media sexy, unlike CEOs of companies that are actually rated by assets, productivity or turnver. Those tend to be ressource oriented (and we all know we're living in a post-industrial world, yadda yadda), or Chinese banks and hence not known to an American audience. Well, JP Morgan might be known.

Shadowrun is an in-the-open plutocracy - their Top-10 megacorp CEOs are much more public because, unlike the CEOs and presidents of Chinese Agriculture, Exxon Mobil and JP Morgan, they have a very public, open, political office in addition to their business function. Plus, they're ... more memorable. Because two of them are Godzilla monsters.

I'd set it up more like DocWagon. You pay a monthly/annual service fee, and you're allowed to call for airborne drone support. Different packages allow for different support to be called (bringing in heavy weaponry requries a Platinum Membership, ect) and you'd have to figure out response times based on what sort of coverage area you're in. Might be an interesting way to introduce players who aren't drone & matrix savvy to the wonderful world of force-multipliers.

Wait, this is supposed to be purely armed drone services? I assumed their mainstay would be transport and delivery, and surveillance/imaging ... then make it a mercenary comapny. And it won't be A-rated at all, given it's a niche in an already niche market.

My understanding of the requirement for A rating is "only" to conduct activity in at least two countries and register with the Corporate Court. And it only gives the right to submit legal disputes with other corporations to the court, and to petition for AA status when the time has come.

In spite of Shadowrun lack of knowledge when it comes to RL corporations and business, there are actually two things that are fairly consistent with each other (by random chances I guess).

Diversified conglomerates used to be a lot more common in the late 19th and early 20th century. The lack of long-range communication and logistic solutions prevented extending business at an international level, so businessmen instead reinvested profits into new activities. It's not globalization that ended this, but rather the rise of stock markets and investment funds and the cult of liquidity.
Old companies were often owned by one or two individuals, or a family. That was for life. By opening their capitalization to investors to gather more funds, they were forced to abide to short or middle term strategies. When an investor puts money into a company, it considers when it will pull out. Each activity has its own cycle of rise and fall. So a company specialized into a single field will simply follow one trend. A company with broad interests is going to have divisions on the rise, other going down, so it's more difficult, if not outright imposible to assess when it is the good time to buy or sell.
Investors apply a "conglomerate discount" to the share of diversified conglomerates for this reason. That is, they consider that such conglomerate worthes less than the sum of its parts. This in turn prompts management to keep investing in their core activity rather than expand into new ones, as the same amount of money spent in the former will up market capitalization more than the latter.

The only exception where the Japanese Keiretsu, who evolved from the familial Zaibatsu. Even if the companies are no longer owned by a family, each of the companies inside a Keiretsu keeps its money invested in the others. If Sumimoto Bank is willing to invest in the steel industry, it will give money to Sumitomo Metal Industries, not Mitsubishi Steel Manufacturing, even if the latter is faring better. It's really down to sheer corporate loyaty.

In Shadowrun, for no particular reasons, the megacorporations have a very little floating stock, if they have any. Most of the stock is owned by a handful of individuals, which, if it wasn't for a great dragon's will, wouldn't have changed between Corporate Shadowfiles in 2054 and Corporate Guide in 2070. We've never been told about investment funds that would wield a significant power. Megacorporate shareholders are here to stay. So it's rather consistent with their shareholding structure that, without the threat of conglomerate discount, nothing prevents the megacorporation from diversifying into multiple activities.

Corporate Guide told us that the Business Recognition Acts actually impose very severe restrictions on the financial industry (they're pretty much what ATTAC always wanted). This both kind of explains the Elven Nations (they live as tax havens and havens of risky financial maneuvers, basically) and the 1920s style economy of the setting. In the end, the megas keep the financial sector down, hard, to maintain their own power, or that seems to be the idea.

It's worth noting, though, that even today, partial state control of corporations can create interesting constellations, like China's banks which heavily priorize Chinese companies, pan-European Airbus with it's production contingents decided entirely by politics, and German Volkswagen, which is both protected and ied down by a law specifically made to keep the company in Germany and to keep them from outsourcing more than the state likes. Japanese companies also are tied strongly to the government. Pure short-term, shareholder value companies are more of an Anglo-American phenomenon. Probably by chance, but Shadowrun is not so much out there. The world just doesn't priorize investment return as much as the real world does, for the sake of political power (which actually is fairly logical, given how massively politicized Shadowrun corporations are, including standing militaries and huge swathes of infrastructure, and other money sinks).