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Definition

A company which has offices and businesses in many different countries. These are generally very big well-known names like Microsoft, Coca Cola, Nestle and Sony, but South Africa has spawned several multi-national companies - most notably Anglo American, Bidvest, Naspers and Cartrack. Today it is difficult to grow a company beyond a certain size while staying inside South Africa or even the African continent and most successful listed companies sooner or later try their hand at expanding overseas. Many of them, like Famous Brands or Woolworths have had a very bad experience of expanding overseas, but others like Spar and The Foschini Group are highly successful. Being a multi-national means that the company derives its incomes from various jurisdictions and often much of it is in a hard currency - so multi-nationals are almost always rand hedge shares.

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