Business a concept has been around for millennia. Even before money, there were businesses that would trade of barter with others for their products or services. Once money became more normalised about 2-3,000 years ago, businesses became more and more common place, they were able to offer their products and services to more and more people as they became less and less limited by their local population size.

As their customer base grew, so did the potential size of the business and its ability to store wealth - it would be impossible for many of today’s businesses to even exist without money, because with bartering and direct local trade alone as their means of growth and longevity, they would be far more susceptible to local fluctuations in prices, stability of the local economy, whether their country was at war, the local taxes and laws and so on.

Once freed from these confinements with free-market trade around 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, businesses were able to begin to dominate the landscape as we know it today, however this far from makes businesses immune to failure or closure for any number of reasons. From business-specific reasons such as not having anyone to take over the business once the original owner retires or dies, getting funding or just that the product or service they are selling does not hold the test of time; to the larger reasons of the economic climate, war, changing governments, country boundaries and population migration – there are almost an infinite number of reasons why over 99.99999% of all businesses ever founded are no longer around.

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So which business has endured all of the potential hardships over centuries to stake their claim to be the oldest business still operating today? Well that title goes to Kongo Gumi, a construction company in Japan specialising in temples and shrines, founded in 578 CE by an immigrant commissioned by Prince Shotoku to build the Shitenno-Ji Buddhist temple. Kongo Gumi was a family-run company for over 1,400 years until, but despite having an annual turnover of around $70 million dollars with 100 employees, in 2006 the company got into financial debt it couldn’t get out of and became a subsidiary of Takamatsu, where it still specialises in Buddhist temples.

Japan holds many records for old businesses, locally called shinise, including over 50% of all of the world’s oldest businesses (businesses must be over 200 years old to be counted, according to a Bank of Korea report in 2008 incl. 41 countries). In 2009 Japan did a national survey which counted over 21,000 companies more than 100 years old.

So, if the winner for the oldest company in the world goes to Japan, what about the top 10? Well, it turns out that the entire top 5 oldest companies are all Japanese, including the Kongo Gumi (578) – temple construction, Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan (705), Koman (717) and Hoshi Ryokan (718) – all hotels and Genda Shigyo (771) - a maker of ceremonial paper goods. Then in 6th place is St. Peter Stiftskulinarium (803) an Austrian restaurant, Staffelter de Paris (862) a German win producer, Monnaie de Paris (864) a French mint, Tanaka-Iga (885) a Japanese maker of religious goods and The Royal Mint (886) the UK’s currency producer.

Out of the oldest 50 companies in the world still around today, 24 of them are Japanese, 8 are from the UK, 6 are from Germany, 3 from France, 2 each from Austria and Switzerland, and 1 each from China, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Slovenia and Spain. The most recent of these 50 is the Adam & Eve pub in the United Kingdom founded in 1249. By far the most popular are of business in the top 50 is the hotel, with 15, but if we add food and drinks business to this, such as restaurants, pubs and breweries it takes the total up to 37. With the rest mostly construction, religious or mints.

According to a study from the Santa Fe Institute in 2005, the average publicly-traded company lasts about 10 years, and the NY times say a private small businesses life-span in around 8.5 years. This really puts into perspective just how phenomenal it is that there are businesses around today that have been trading for over a thousand years.