Co-operatives (co-ops) are companies where most of the customers are also in part the owners of the company. These companies are much harder to sell (a good thing for diversity and keeping jobs around), and their focus automatically is on their customers and less on profit. In short: their whole attitude is different than the ones of large shareholder companies.
Successful co-ops (incidentally all from Switzerland- do you know of any others?):
- Mobility Car Sharing
- Mobiliar Insurance (they distribute most of their profits back to their customers)
- Raiffeisen Bank (very untouched by the financial crisis)
- Migros retailer (1 percent of their revenue must go to cultural events)
Just an observation...
20 February, 2010 - 09:21
A few weeks after my posting above, the Raiffeisen Bank posted in their client magazine a good article about co-ops on pages 4 - 9 (text in German). The article states: