November 30th, 2095
Maria Petrov
354 claps, 510 shares

It's the end of a year starting with the number 2, and GEC is once again throwing it's weight around the business world. Their founding was an opening salvo for the history books, but the past 10 years has seen another salvo which we should pay attention to (not that a lot of us weren't already doing so)

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To explain, let's look at a glossed-over purchase a half-year ago: Stockpile Resource Extractions Global (or SREG for short). It was a failing organisation, limited to the dusty ground of our planet without orbit rights. After doing some digging into a few records, me & Alexis Montagne had uncovered that their most recent shareholders meeting had outlined that SREG was looking at filing for bankruptcy.

This is one of multiple companies GEC acquired over the past 10 years, so gobbling up collateral isn't anything new - but a bankrupted resource extraction company? GEC is basically one of the pillars of orbital logistics, why are they suddenly interested in this (comparitively) small-time bit-player on Earth?

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With every acquisition, there's many reasons or futures to opine upon, but let's stick to just a couple:

I see it as them looking for more land - one of the few valuable commodities we have left - to help with their various space operations. We already have precedent for this: 4 years ago they turned an abandoned dam & it's dried-up lake into a testing area for orbital drones. So why not use quarries or mines for their newest line of models?

Now the much more conspiratorial take is this: it's them daring or bluffing the government whilst they continue talks of breaking up GEC's monopoly, saying something along the lines of "We own your raw materials now, do you want to bite the hand that feeds?" (We've seen as much underhanded talk from the previous heads of their Operations division)

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As said, this can go many different ways. But if we see GEC continue to bulldoze it's way into more sectors like the one SREG operates in, we're going to go well past the point of dependency: we're going to be indentured to them.