National Corporations

A National Corporation is the state's own enterprise: the single container into which a government folds everything it takes into public hands, and the vehicle it uses to deliver public services, prop up strategic industry, and feed profit back to the treasury. Where a private corporation answers to shareholders, a National Corporation answers to the state: it cannot go bankrupt, it pays no dividends to investors, and its profits are remitted to the national budget.

This page covers the National Corporation as a thing you run: its structure, who controls it, what it does for the country, and how to operate it well. For the rules on how a government takes a corporation in the first place (eligibility, triggers, compensation tiers, notice windows), see the companion page on Nationalization.

private corp ──(nationalize: absorb)──▶  National Corporation  ──(privatize: spin out)──▶  new private corp

Structure: primary and split-offs#

Every country has one primary National Corporation plus zero or more split-offs. The primary is the catch-all: it holds every sector type that hasn't been carved out on its own, and it is the entity the state's sovereign bonds are issued against. A split-off is a secondary National Corporation that owns exactly one sector type (for example, a dedicated state rail or energy company carved out of the primary).

When the state nationalizes an asset, each seized sector is routed to the National Corporation that owns its sector type: a split-off if one claims that type, otherwise the primary. A whole-company taking that spans several sector types fans its sectors out to the right corporations automatically.

The primary is labelled Primary in the page masthead; a split-off shows its sector type (e.g. "energy split-off").

The National Corporation page#

Each National Corporation has its own page, organized into tabs. Which tabs you see depends on who you are:

Officials toggle between a Public view and a State Official view; the official session warns that actions execute against the live economy.

Who controls a National Corporation#

Authority is deliberately split between three seats so no single player runs the whole machine:

• Head of government: designates strategic sectors and authorizes takings (the Nationalize surface).
• Finance minister (Secretary of the Treasury, Chancellor, Minister of Finance, and equivalents): the ministry that owns policy: appoint or remove the CEO, set public-service mandates, split off or merge back sector types, set the CEO's treasury-draw cap, and privatize. If the finance portfolio is vacant, the head of government can act as a fallback so no country is ever locked out.
• CEO: runs day-to-day operations within the policy and budget the ministry sets. A CEO is appointed by the ministry, not elected by shareholders (a National Corporation has none), and the finance minister may appoint themselves. A National Corporation CEO may not also be CEO of any other company.

The clean line: the ministry sets policy; the CEO runs operations. A CEO cannot set mandates, take or sell assets, or raise their own budget cap.

What National Corporations are for: public mandates#

The reason to own an enterprise rather than tax a private one is the public-service mandate. Each turn, an SOE's sectors push the state metric they're matched to, slowly but durably, because policy effects decay only gradually. The more of a region's sector the state owns, the larger the nudge.

Two postures let the ministry trade profit for public value, set corp-wide or overridden per sector:

• Price-controlled: forces low consumer prices and high output. It strengthens the public-service contribution but costs extra operating margin. The forgone profit shows up as a "mandate subsidy" the treasury effectively pays.
• Employment-guaranteed: the SOE acts as employer of last resort and keeps a worker floor, easing unemployment, at a smaller margin cost.

Running the enterprise: the CEO's four levers#

From the Operations tab, the seated CEO grows the corporation using four state-appropriate levers (no marketing, no market bond issuance, since those aren't state-appropriate):

1. Capacity investment: fund a sector's growth so its output (and revenue, remittance, jobs, and citizens served) expands over turns.
2. Modernization (R&D): build the corp's innovation momentum toward a breakthrough.
3. Production: set a per-sector output target (roughly −25% to +25%); the active level trends toward it about one point per turn. Higher production raises revenue, which grows the workforce organically.
4. Treasury capital draw: pull cash from the national budget into the corp to finance the above, up to the ministry's cap.

All spending is funded from the corp's own working capital (or a treasury draw); the engine consumes it as a genuine expense. Money is always conserved: nothing is minted.

Financing: a two-actor model#

The financing system has built-in tension between the CEO and the minister:

• Profit retention (CEO-set). Each turn the corp's operating profit splits between what stays in the corp (a reinvestment war-chest) and what is remitted to the national budget. The CEO sets retention between 0% and 75%: at least 25% always remits to the budget, a floor neither actor can breach. The default is to remit everything.
• Treasury-draw cap (minister-set). The minister sets a per-turn ceiling on how much the CEO may pull from the budget. Setting it to 0 freezes draws entirely: the lever the ministry uses to rein in a CEO for fiscal or political reasons.

So the CEO can self-fund by retaining profit or lean on the treasury up to the cap, but can never raise that cap, and can never starve the budget below the remittance floor.

Treasury backing: SOEs can't go bankrupt#

If a National Corporation runs an operating loss, the treasury automatically covers the shortfall and the corp's cash is restored to zero: it never defaults. This is what makes mandates like price control viable: the state knowingly funds a money-losing public service. The flip side is that a loss-making SOE is a real, ongoing drain on the national budget.

Efficiency: governance matters#

There is no flat "state-run penalty." Instead, an SOE's operating margin carries a dynamic efficiency drag that depends on how well the country is governed:

• A well-run, transparent, low-corruption state runs its enterprises close to private efficiency (a single-digit drag).
• A corrupt one, or one leaning hard on price controls, bleeds far more margin (toward roughly −25 percentage points).

Good governance, low corruption, and a light mandate touch keep an SOE profitable; corruption and heavy price controls push it toward losses. The Holdings drill-down breaks the penalty down so you can see exactly where the drag comes from.

The cost of empire: concentration and confidence#

Nationalization is meant to be a real but costly tool, and the cost escalates the more of the economy the state already owns. Two linked gauges, both on the Register tab, drive this:

• State Ownership Concentration Index (SOCI), 0 to 100: the share of the country's corporate economy that the state owns, revenue-weighted. Below a danger zone (around a third of the economy) it does almost nothing; past it, every new taking costs more political capital, scars investor confidence harder, and takes longer to digest. A sprawling state sector also runs somewhat less efficiently (an "overreach" drag), though a well-run economy can still be profitable long-term; the cost is front-loaded, not permanent.
• Investor confidence, 0 to 100 (baseline 70): a national mood that heals back toward baseline each turn (about 5% of the gap). Fairly-paid, popular takings (rescuing a failing firm, breaking a monopoly) barely move it; expropriating healthy private firms, especially cheaply, takes a real bite, amplified by how much the state already owns.

Low confidence isn't cosmetic. It feeds three live systems shown as tiles on the Register tab:

1. Private-corp margins: an expropriation-risk drag on surviving private firms (SOEs are exempt).
2. Sovereign borrowing: a risk premium on the government's own bond rate.
3. New-corp founding: a surcharge on the cost to incorporate (up to +25% at rock-bottom confidence), dampening private growth.

A statist governing bloc pays less of this political cost; a market-liberal one pays more. The Register tab reads your bloc's stance and labels how expensive nationalizing versus privatizing currently is.

Restructuring: split-offs and merge-backs#

The finance ministry can reorganize the state's holdings without any money changing hands (a National Corporation has no shareholders to compensate):

• Split off a sector type into a new, named secondary National Corporation. Every holding of that type moves into it. You can even pre-create an empty one to claim routing for a type before you own any of it. Only one National Corporation may own a given sector type per country.
• Merge a split-off back into the primary (or another National Corporation). Its sectors move over and the now-empty shell is dissolved.

Splitting lets you give a strategic industry its own CEO, mandate posture, and books; merging consolidates when that's no longer worth the overhead.

Privatization: the relief valve#

Selling assets back to the market is the genuine way down from a high SOCI: it lowers concentration, raises investor confidence (+5), and is politically rewarded for market-leaning governments. The finance minister carves a brand-new, named corporation out of a National Corporation's holding and floats it:

• Carve size is market-capped. A spin-out may not end up controlling more than 30% of its regional market: so a small holding can be sold in full, but breaking up a dominant state position requires several separate spin-outs (an anti-monopoly guard).
• Method: IPO or auction. An IPO releases shares to the public float at a floor price, with proceeds crediting the treasury; an auction runs a bid window (48 turns) and hands the winner the company. An auction that closes below reserve simply folds the carve-out back into the National Corporation.
• Golden share. The state may retain up to 40% of a spun-out corporation: a minority stake with a veto over relocation and dissolution, whose dividends flow to the treasury.
• Cooldowns. A freshly privatized corp can't be re-nationalized, and a freshly absorbed sector can't be privatized, for 168 turns each, preventing seize-sell-seize churn in either direction.

Acquiring assets (in brief)#

Unowned and NPC assets can be nationalized freely. A player-owned company is protected and can only be taken when a trigger unlocks it: financial distress (an abandoned or insolvent firm), operating in a designated strategic sector, holding a near-total (75%+) market monopoly, or a legislative supermajority (two-thirds) vote. Most takings post a notice window (48 turns) so the target can respond. Compensation is paid at a steep premium over a company's going-concern value, scaled by the tier the authority uses. The full rules live on the Nationalization page.

Strategy notes#

• Own things that pay you back in metrics, not just cash. A price-controlled utility or a guaranteed-employment heavy industry may run thin or at a loss, but the durable lift to grid reliability, food security, or unemployment can be worth more than the profit you gave up.
• Watch the concentration gauge. The first nationalization is cheap; the twentieth, with a third of the economy state-owned, is a real fiscal and political liability. Keep an eye on SOCI before the next taking.
• Privatize to reset. If confidence is suppressed and SOCI is high, selling a few mature holdings restores room to maneuver, and a market government gets paid politically for doing it.
• Mind governance. Fighting corruption and improving transparency quietly raises every SOE's margin at once. A clean state runs a profitable public sector; a corrupt one runs a money pit.
• Use the two-actor budget deliberately. A minister who trusts a CEO raises the draw cap and lets them retain profit to invest; a minister who doesn't can freeze the cap to 0 and force full remittance.

See also#

• Nationalization: the taking lifecycle: eligibility, triggers, compensation, and counterplay.
• Corporations: how private corporations, sectors, and margins work.
• National Budget: where remittance, compensation, and loss-backing land.
• National Metrics: the state metrics public mandates improve.