Project - World's Oldest Businesses

An important part of business is planning for the future and ensuring that the business survives changing market conditions. Some businesses do this remarkably well and last for hundreds of years. In this project, I explored data from BusinessFinancing.co.uk on the world's oldest businesses: when were they founded, and which industries do they belong to?

Like many business problems, the data is contained in several different datasets. In order to understand the world's oldest businesses, I first needed to use joining techniques to merge our data. From there, I used manipulation tools such as grouping and filtering to answer questions about these historic businesses.

About the Datasets

I have used four different datasets (courtesy of Datacamp).

  1. ‘businesses.csv’ contains the details about the name of the business, year the business was founded, the category code of the business, and the ISO 3166-1 3-letter country code.

  2. ‘new_businesses.csv’ contains the same columns as the ‘businesses.csv’ table and lists the oldest businesses in a few of the missing countries.

  3. ‘countries.csv’ contains information about the ISO 3166-1 3-letter country code, name of the country, and name of the continent that the country exists in.

  4. ‘categories.csv’ contains information about the description of the business categories.

Key Findings

Business Question that I try to answer: "What characteristics enable a business to stand the test of time?"

These are some of the key findings for this project:

  1. Banking and Finance is an excellent industry to be in from a longetivity perspective.

  2. Cafés, Restaurants & Bars is another industry sector that has been around for a really, really, long time.

  3. The continent-wise breakup for the different industry categories and the earliest year that records their existence is as follows:

    Africa Asia Europe North_America Aus Oc South_America

  4. The other thing