ABSTRACT
Industry and market structures sometimes last for many, many years and seem completely stable. The world aluminium industry, for instance, after one century is still led by the Pittsburgh-based Aluminium Company of America which held the original patents, and by its Canadian offspring, Alcan of Montreal. There has only been one major newcomer in the world’s cigarette industry since the 1920s, the South African Rembrandt group. And in an entire century only two newcomers have emerged as leading electrical apparatus manufacturers in the world: Philips in Holland and Hitachi in Japan. Similarly no major new retail chain emerged in the United States for forty years, between the early twenties when Sears, Roebuck began to move from mail order into retail stores, and the mid-sixties when an old dime-store chain, Kresge, launched the K-Mart discount stores. Indeed, industry and market structures appear so solid that the people in an industry are likely to consider them fore-ordained, part of the order of nature, and certain to endure forever.
