Okay here is the problem, one of the guys I play with has decided that he wants to create his own AAA mega corp. And yes you did read that correctly. Being one of the regular GM's I basically want to tell him that he's on something and that I wouldn't allow it. But the kicker is that he won't play that character anymore because he is "retired". Does anyone have a good idea as to how the rest of the group can handle this tiny issue? Personally I would like to have every other AAA corp break down his front door and steal all of his R&D along with all of his employees. To prove how far this has gone, he asked me awhile back how much I thought it would cost to create a Dikote plant. I also believe that he wanted to know how much a cybermacy clinic would cost to start-up and maintain.
Any suggestions???

Create his own? Sure, go for it, let him try. In twenty years, let him try to resist a hostile takeover with some serious shadowruns to soften him up.

Hell, just hand him a copy of the old game Capitalism. If he can beat that in three tries, give him his corp. Otherwise tell him he's unemployed and broke at the age of 60.

~J

He does realise you don't "start-up" a AAA corp. you have to earn your way up. That means he needs legal citizenship outside of a corp, he needs venture capital (that is legally his), etc. Then he'd be just another asshole with a business license. It would litteraly take years to build up to C status, let alone AAA.

I see. The biggest problem with the whole works is that he picks and chooses what rules he uses and mostly that involves skipping them. I was talking to him the other day and he made the comment that the "company" wasn't going to declare AAA status until they hit the 500 million nuyen mark. I know that most of his product his military wear, think Ares might take notice?

only 500 million? See, here is the problem, to be a AAA you need a seat on the corp court, and they dont give those away.

I think the layer may be confused as to what being a AAA company means.

Eh, let Ares get miffed and perform a "Corporate Takeover." Despite the current meaning of the term, as an AAA, Ares doesn't need the consent of the smaller corp, and just needs to avoid angering another AAA during the process.

Five hundred million nuyen is nothing whatsoever. Apple Computer, a company that, while certainly up there on the Fortune 500, would still be a AA has some four and a half billion dollars just as a cash reserve.

~J

GE is probably the only A company by shadowrun standards being possibly one of the largest companies int he world.

I looked at GE first. It appears their total revenue in 2003 was $134.2 billion. Wal-Mart is called the biggest company in the world in many places, and it certainly seems to be that based on TR. GE does look more like an archetypical A company because of the greater range of products and industries it works with.

Nah, GE is an AA. Remember, As are actually quite small; they get that status just by being multinational, pretty much.

~J

Well, Walmart is a definite A company. But they are a retailer, not a manufacturer AFAIK

don't forget, GE gets badass points for building nukes.

With all that in mind is there anywhere that states how much a AAA corp fiscally needs to have to gain that status? I checked Corp Shadowfiles and Corp Download and all it gives are stats. There is nothing stating what the point value actually means.

Nothing. A corp with $10 to its name could be AAA. Trick is, they need a seat on the Corporate Court, which realistically won't happen until huge amounts of money are involved. How much money depends on how much of a coup you're willing and able to pull.

~J

I seriously doubt there is such a statement anywhere, and there shouldn't be since that's not what describes an AAA. But you can deduce some figures. For example, assume people consume about as much as they do right now (this is a must if the economy is to function properly), and that the worth of one nuyen is the same as the worth of one 2003 USD. Assume that the economies of the "civilized world" are about as strong as they are today, with CalFree+PCC+CAS+UCAS+Quebec+Most of Europe+Western Russia+Australia+NZ+Japan averaging out to a GDP of about 28,000 and that the populations of these regions are as big as they are now.

Now assume that a megacorp owns a "Wal-Mart" that operates in all these areas (let's put that down as 1.5x the revenue of the current Wal-Mart), a "DaimlerChrysler", a "General Electric", a "Dow Chemicals", etc, continuing with some of the biggest corporations in every sector there is. My earlier estimates were a bit high, though. Since the GDP of the world in 2003 was only $51.48 x 10^12, you'll only end up with figures in the low-mid 13-digits, e.g. 2,000,000,000,000 .

Again, getting your total annual revenues to a 13-digit figure doesn't guarantee that you're an AAA megacorp. But that would be a good start.

Well said Austere

Personally i think that a player wanting to have there own AAA is a none event.

As Kage and a few others have said you need a seat on the Corporate court to be AAA.

Yakashima (sp?) is SR's Biggest AA it's bigger then Novatech by a good margin. Novatech is only an AAA because of a techincality (owns one of the founding companys of the corperate court) And Novatech is own by Richrad Villers, one of thee most buisness minded people in SR with the exception perhaps of Lowfyr himself.

Yeah, Actually as I recall you can;t even reach AA status without approval from the corporate court. They must approve your right to be territorial. Also, as a requirement for AAA status you must have a significant presence in every one of the 12(?) major categories of corporate competition, and have a corporate rating largetr than (I think) 125. Wixing is smaller than that at like 117 but got an exception... Thos numbers may be off a bit but the ranges are about right .

The categories are (if I can remember them off the top of my head)...

Heavy Industry
Agriculture
Mystical Products
Military Hardware
Consumer goods
Aerospace
Entertainment
Computers
Public Services
...err and several other categories

In summation, the big 10 corps, added together, have by canon a cashflow and yearly income equal to or greater than half the Gross Financial Product of the earth. This means the largest corp, SK, (by the most recent numbers) has about 9% of the walth of planet earth and the smallest, Wuxing, has about 2%.

These corps are far bigger than most people fathom. Trillions of dollars at the smallest.

ZIC is an AA and is bigger than Novatech,witch is an AAA. ZIC is about the size of Wuxing or C.A.T.o. ZIC is most likely making in the rangs of high ten too low hundreds of billions each year.

Anything over A, has to be apoved by the corprate court. Note Spinard, was once an AA,but had their status revoked and fined 2,000,000,000 They weren't the biggest AA,and they are still around after that..So in no way should one fourth of that fine make a AAA.

tsk tsk... You are all thinking conventional warfare. Think unconventional and strike at where the enemy is weakest and sow the seeds of their destruction.

The point of course is not the money. But where you target that money. Notice Art Dankwalther. Granted that 20 billion isn't pocket change, but I'll bet you that a tribe of otaku could get you a couple of billion in virtual assets in a week easy. After all, Novatech is teetering on the verge of AA(or even A)-dom. "Persuade" Villiers to sell JRJ International to you and you'll have a AAA on your hands.

So basically there is absolutely NO WAY that a "retired" PC can ever, I repeat ever, found his own AAA corp legally. Would it make a difference if he was trying to keep this all blackmarket. A shadow corp in other words. I think it would get very difficult to create and operate any size corp completely "in the shadows."

What do you mean by shadowcorp? A corp that doesn't pay any taxes? I thought that was a normal corp.

uh, shadow corp? who does it deal with? where does it get it's products? who does it sell to?

Basically a syndicate with production facilities such as the Vory, Yakuza, Triads, and Mafia would qualify as a shadowcorp. Now that's competition.

Tell him he can have an A corp.
That's what I've always done.

And I tell them that if they want that, that they have to go and make it on paper according to proper rule-sets for designing one like the GM would and hand it to me for me to review as plausable as an A corp that could have grown to what they wrote in the time-frame that they wrote.

One of the players once got clever and wrote that he took over the A corp from the preceeding owner who passed away around 10 years prior. He was next in line in rank so he scooted on up.
I let him pull that off because he threw in that there was rumor that his character "offed" the previous owner to get the position of ownership.
That right there was enough for me to snowball a package of hell for him.

But to the point, force him to do the leg work on this thing.
Review it sternly, and simply say, "no" atleast once and maybe twice just to make him get rid of the silly stuff he's going to throw in there because he's excited to "get away" with stuff.
Once he has something YOU like, then allow him to have his little A corp.
Now his hell will begin as he attempts to have fun (which you SO can if you like the stuff) running a business in SR instead of running a major provider for all of his cool toys for running (which, given the type he's looking to make, I'd say is his aim)
The flaw Day Job is by far, a severe understatement here.

But they don't sit on the corporate court.

Edit: I like your way of handling it, Stumps.

I can see an Investment Firm as a Holding Company. And that firm can become a AA by holding enough companies.

Very well, get enough raw assets to be an A company,steal a founding company and leverage the bedrock clause . There you go, AAA without going through AA.

You're talking about tens of billions of nuyen at the very least if you want to pull that off. I doubt any of the founding companies are going to go for any less than that, no matter what kinds of tricks you pull. Just to get near the average A-corp level you'd need to cough up several billion to take over the companies. That kind of money doesn't grow in any flora, and there'd better be a damn good back story as to how exactly he managed to buy up a founding company of the CorpCourt without trouble.

Other than it was on sale like very other thing on the Corp Court? The founding companies themselves might or might not be worth the billions of nuyen that their AAA descendent are worth. Saeder-Krupp owns BMW and Renraku owns Keruba, but that doesn't mean that either could go for less.

If you're just going to buy those companies off an already-AAA corporation overtly, you're going to pay a hell of a lot more for it than what I said above. Hundreds of billions. S-K isn't going to risk its AAA status and allow a complete newbie enter the CorpCourt for a piddly 50 billion nuyen which it can earn in a month. A smaller mega with possible cash flow problems is a better target, but it's still going to take a 12-digit amount of nuyen to just make a deal with the parent AAA for the founding company.

How much is the founding company in real assets? Other then the Corp Court seat? Was it just a holding company in the first place? It could just go for a a piddly 1 if it has no assets to its name.

For an example of the relation between total revenues of a company and its "price", a part of the Yukos oil company, Yuganskneftegas, is being sold by the Russian government. Yuganskneftegas' total revenue in 2002 was $6.83 billion, and the bidding for a 76.8% share of it starts at $8.4 billion. This is well below the expected value of the company, estimated by some company or other that specializes in this crap.

[Edit]I don't know what all the founding companies are, and I certainly don't know what their assets are or how much cash flow is circulated through them, but I seriously doubt any of the AAAs will be willing to give you a seat in the CorpCourt for anything less than dozens and hundreds of billions of nuyen even if the founding company only exists on paper.[/Edit]

Even though the player's character may have millions of dollars in assets, I'd say making a AAA corp would be about as easy for the player's character to do, as the player himself could do right now in real life with their existing assets.

IIRC there were a few DSers that claimed to have characters that ran corps. Was it Darth Phylos (sp)?

I think Hunter had one too. "Griffen Industries: A Shadowrunner's Corp."

I never read Darth's stuff but he did post it here.

Hunter's outfit seemed like a combo Merc Op and Doc Wagon crew (well, a BIG crew) that also made weapons.

You might try the search function. Hunter had his own website but that was a few years back.

Its not really my place to judge (not that its ever stopped me before) but I always found the idea of a PC--even a retired one--running a Mega a little absurd. Take a look at some of the bigwigs: Villiers, Knight, Lofwyr, and Buttercup, to name few. Hell, Miles Lanier would outclass any Prime Runner w/o breaking a sweat and he just WORKS for the guy the runs the whole show. I'm a pretty smart chap in RL and I've played characters that are way smarter than me. None of them even came close to holding a candle to those hombres.

If your player is deadset on this then make him earn it. All he has to is pull off something like the Nanosecond Buyout. Make sure he follows all that other stuff about a legal ID and MASSIVE amounts of capital...Tell him good luck for me and let us know how it turns out.

If the player in question has the arguement that his char is "retired" then that char gets turned over to the GM.

Okay, let me see if I can clarify what I meant from the last posting I did. From what I have gathered for this particular player about this "corp" is that a group of runners that he created are running the show. They hire staff choose what types of products they build, etc. From what he has told me is that there are a lot of vehicle mods and vehicles in general. I also believe that they designed some type of powered armor, think Mechwarrior just smaller. And the Panzerkracken from Cyberpunk. I'm not sure to whom he plans on selling this stuff to, but alot of the big stuff seems to be Mil-spec equivalent. So they are making a legit business, but none of the PC's have SIN numbers. Think that will cause some issues??

How old is this player?

To me, it seems like there may be a neat alteranate campaign buried in here with the pc's playing the heads of corporations attempting to attain AAA status. They could merge their individual corps, or attempt hostile takeovers of each other or NPC corps. During the course of their games they could even hire shadowrunners and wait to hear the results of said operations.

But its a little beyond the scope of the games I play in. I could see a runner retiring and-- under perfect conditions-- starting up maybe a C corp. For him to go much higher would take a long time that the rest of the group (the shadowrunners) wouldn't wait around for. Unless the new corporation was going to be the focus of the new campaign, I'd tell the player not to worry about it. You can figure out how the new corp is doing after ten years go by.

The only viable way that I can see this happening is if they do a Dankwalther and decide to go after Novatech/Richard Villiers. Since he personally owns JRJ International as a private corporation, you take over that and you get a guarenteed place on the Corporate Court. And with Art turning the screws he's in an even more vulnerable position than normal.

Of course since it's a private corporation then this is going to take some doing. Even if Novatech goes down in flames he can sell it off to any other corporation in the world for massive fuck off amounts of cash, stocks and a position to safeguard his life and immediately vault them to non-recindable AAA status. Any AA, and even some triple A corps like Wuxing or CATCo, would practically bankrupt themselves for this.

There are no publicly traded original members of the Corporate Court then?

How do you think Mr Villiers or Mr Knight was able to own some of the most powerful commercial and economic entities in the SR world? How? If it is impossible or somehow you think it cannot be done, then it is perhaps a limitation of the GM rather than the player.

I didn't say it was impossible, I said it was beyond the scope of most games. If it was in the territory of its own specialized campaign, where all the players are involved, it might be a neat alternate campaign. But that wasn't how this situation was reported. One player is retiring his character and wants that character to go on to become a major player in the Shadowrun universe. Its roughly comparable to someone saying, "I'm going to retire my character and he's going to become President of the UCAS."

As a gm, I'd say, "Fantastic. I'll let you know how it goes when the timeline is 10 years down the road. In the meantime, make up a new character because the group is going on a run this Saturday."