Joint-stock company in the context of "British East India Company"

The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company that was founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (which included the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia), and later with East Asia. The company gained control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent and Hong Kong. At its peak, the company was the largest corporation in the world by various measures and had its own armed forces in the form of the company's three presidency armies, totalling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British Army at certain times.

Originally chartered as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies," the company rose to account for half of the world's trade during the mid-1700s and early 1800s, particularly in basic commodities including cotton, silk, indigo dye, sugar, salt, spices, saltpetre, tea, gemstones, and later opium. The company also initiated the beginnings of the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent.

The Fortune 500 is an annual list compiled and published by Fortune magazine that ranks 500 of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for their respective fiscal years. The list includes publicly held companies, along with privately held companies for which revenues are publicly available. The concept of the Fortune 500 was created by Edgar P. Smith, a Fortune editor, and the first list was published in 1955. The Fortune 500 is more commonly used than its subset Fortune 100 or superset Fortune 1000.

Privatization (rendered privatisation in British English) can mean several different things, most commonly referring to transitioning something from the public sector into the private sector. It is also sometimes used as a synonym for deregulation when a heavily regulated private company or industry becomes less regulated. Government functions and services may also be privatised (which may also be known as "franchising" or "out-sourcing"); in this case, private entities are tasked with the implementation of government programs or performance of government services that had previously been the purview of state-run agencies. Some examples include revenue collection, law enforcement, water supply, and prison management.

Another definition is that privatization is the sale of a state-owned enterprise or municipally owned corporation to private investors; in this case shares may be traded in the public market for the first time, or for the first time since an enterprise's previous nationalization. This type of privatization can include the demutualization of a mutual organization, cooperative, or public-private partnership in order to form a joint-stock company.

The United Rocket and Space Corporation (Russian: Объединенная ракетно-космическая корпорация) or URSC is a Russian joint-stock corporation formed by the Russian government in 2013 to renationalize the Russian space sector. The government intended to do so in such a way as to "preserve and enhance the Roscosmos space agency". The reorganization continued into 2014 with a Sberbank cooperation agreement, and 2015 with a process to merge with the Russian Federal Space Agency to create the Roscosmos State Corporation. Roscosmos Space Agency, as a state agency, was abolished in December 2015 and the Roscosmos state-run corporation took over 1 January 2016 and the United Rocket and Space Corporation became part of the newly formed Roscosmos State Corporation in accordance with presidential decree No. 221.

Rail transport is an important mode of long-distance transportation in China. As of 2024, the country had more than 159,000 km (98,798 mi) of railways, the 2nd longest network in the world. By the end of 2023, China had more than 45,000 kilometres (27,962 miles) of high-speed rail (HSR), the longest HSR network in the world.

The railway sector in China is essentially operated by the central government. Almost all rail operations are handled by the China State Railway Group Company, Limited, a state-owned company created in March 2013 (as China Railway Corporation) after the dissolution of the Ministry of Railways and was converted into a joint-stock company and placed under the control of the Ministry of Finance in June 2019.

Barclays PLC (/ˈbɑːrkliz/, occasionally /-leɪz/) is a British multinational universal bank, headquartered in London, England. Barclays operates as five divisions: the UK Consumer Bank, UK Corporate Bank, Private Bank and Wealth Management (PBWM), Investment Bank, and the US Consumer Bank.

Barclays traces its origins to the goldsmith banking business established in the City of London in 1690. James Barclay became a partner in the business in 1736. In 1896, twelve banks in London and the English provinces, including Goslings Bank, Backhouse's Bank and Gurney, Peckover and Company, united as a joint-stock bank under the name Barclays and Co. Over the following decades, Barclays expanded to become a nationwide bank. In 1967, Barclays deployed the world's first cash dispenser. Barclays has made numerous corporate acquisitions, including of London, Provincial and South Western Bank in 1918, British Linen Bank in 1919, Mercantile Credit in 1975, the Woolwich in 2000 and the North American operations of Lehman Brothers in 2008.