5th April, 2056 by Arthur Morsley, Wealth Correspondent
Business, GEC/ Big Tech / Google / Apple

The Brazilian Department of Commerce has greenlit the world's newest mega-corporation: GEC.

It brings together the 3 major corporations we've seen chew up their own respective sectors:

• GravTech, the aeronautical & orbital pioneers of the asteroid mining industry
• Endurance Logistics, who most recently acquired the Panama Canal zone
• and Creed International, the upstart "youngest brother" big tech firm of the 3 members

The cumulative buying power of this group is something to fear (if you aren't someone like Apple or one of Asia's conglomerates of course), and each of the members has already made statements gesturing to their next steps - a spending spree unlike any other (maybe one that we should probably already coin a term for, as the cash to be transferred will be legendary).

The first on the table looks to be robotics firms - we can easily guess the Adam Project will be the first - followed by computer component manufacturing. Given that Endurance Logistics has been expanding their reach in West Africa, this could be the flailing Nigerian sector? Or maybe whatever western nation wants to give them the most tax breaks. But following those, the most peculiar of their gesturing is towards any company that dabbles with Space/Earth's orbit. I'm not just talking about launching the ships, this is a full-on production line of purchases: manufacturing, launch facilities, orbital docks, astronaut training, etc.

GravTech already owns a majority share of the private sector, but in the past year leading up to this formation - with hindsight - we now know that Endurance Logistics will have been giving them an easier turnaround of their raw materials (see the controversy in February at Panama, where a GravTech-laden container ship got bumped up the priority list above other ships that day. Now that is already a fun coincidence, but: This was ahead of a supposedly tight deadline for a GravTech launch, which is a little more than coincidence, no?

With all that in mind - including the little piggybacking each founder is already giving one another - we can reason out a few ideas for what GEC is priming to do:

• They're aiming to have a dominant stake in the private robotics industry
• They're aiming to own the entire production line for that industry
• And they're going to be a major force in the space & asteroid mining industries (which use robotics to the nth degree)

To me, that looks like a scary deck of cards at the table. No other megacorporation standing right now can claim to own earth & space - they each own their respective slices of those realms, sure - but up to this point a megacorporation has had to interface with someone else to get there.

So: we can guess a lot of money is going to swap hands, we can guess that GEC is going to become a common word, and we know that the Brazilian government is going to enjoy it. But what else can we expect?

Well, given that each of them is a leader in their field amongst the Global North, there's the possibility in a step-up of rivalries with Chinese groups, & most likely a shoutier voice at the Western table when it comes to regulation, policy, so on. Creed International is already very vocal as a lobbying power for keeping Robotics as a private endeavour, so the extra funding & reach will probably see them move bases to less-regulated gardens if they don't get their way.

But, to reiterate: we now have one conglomerate that dominates the space industry, dominates the logistics for that industry, and dominates the robots that propel that industry. This one conglomerate will do so for the entire western world. And that is something we should be thinking hard about.