The first concern allegedly appeared in Florence, and was created by C. Medici to transport all kinds of goods along the Silk Road. But much later, the growth of new subspecies of concentration of production entailed the further development of such enterprises.
The scientific and technological revolution, the aggravation of uneven economic development, as well as the fierce competitive war between the capitalist monopolies that took place after the Second World War, under the influence of all these reasons, the concern begins to acquire new features. Among them is the strengthening of interindustry factors associated with certain conditions of capital accumulation. We can also note the growth of applied and scientific research, a sharp increase in the number of fairly large laboratories engaged in scientific activities, as well as experimental departments and workshops.
So, the concern is a monopolistic association, or rather, one of its forms or, if you like, subspecies. The concern can be characterized as a unity of ownership and control. The concern is characterized by a form of subordination to the financial magnates of a number of enterprises included in its composition. Less commonly, the governing body of the concern is a specially created link - a holding company that owns a controlling stake in various companies.
Explaining the question of what a concern is, we define it as several united firms that, in addition to common interests, control, contracts, and production and technological ties, have less exposure to diversification. And the difference between such an organization and a conglomerate consists in a more developed form of a general association of enterprises.
In practice, a concern is an association around a rather large enterprise, which is most often the parent or parent. Such a parent company holds the shares of all members of the concern, without exception. The concern, the definition of which is now increasingly becoming a part of the business, can be positioned as a combined production system that seeks to produce products. This product, in turn, should be competitive in the market for such products. The concern is a kind of machine, a system for introducing new technologies and equipment, it is an embodiment of the concentration of the available scientific potential, means and forces.
Each of the members of such a merger has the right to maintain economic independence, however, none of the participants has the right to join other concerns. A characteristic feature of such a combined enterprise can be considered the release and sale of the final product, as well as the provision of services with the process of covering all aspects of the activity at once.
The concern is a group of companies of a financial and industrial orientation, distributed mainly in the territories of European countries, as well as in the Baltic states. They can be divided into industry and intersectoral. International concerns are most often called transnational. For this case, the preservation of the economic and legal independence of each of the participants is typical, however, coordination by the structures that are dominant is taken into account. As a rule, the participants of the concern are united not only solely by their economic potential , but also by a number of efforts made by the market strategy.
Among the main advantages of such large-scale enterprises, one can single out the concentration of financial and a number of other resources. Modern concerns owe much of their development to the dynamics of the financial markets of the 1960s; for that time, constantly changing recessions and booms of the economy were characteristic.