Nationalization & National Corporations
Nationalization is the state-ownership lifecycle: a government can take a private corporation (or one of its sectors) into public hands, run it as a state-owned enterprise, and later sell it back to the market. Every country has a single central National Corporation that absorbs what the state takes over, plus optional split-offs for individual sector types.
private corp ──(nationalize: absorb)──▶ National Corporation ──(privatize: spin out)──▶ new private corp
The two directions are inverses of one another. Nationalizing folds a target's sectors, assets, and bonds into the country's National Corporation and dissolves the original shell. Privatizing carves a new, independently named corporation back out and floats it to investors.
When the state can take a corporation#
Unowned and NPC assets can be nationalized freely. A player-owned corporation is protected: the state may only reach it when one of four conditions unlocks the target.
| Trigger | Condition | Notice |
|---|---|---|
| Financial distress | The CEO seat has been vacant for 72 turns, or insolvency or a defaulted bond has accumulated 72 financial-distress turns. | Seized once the grace condition is complete, with no further notice. |
| Strategic sector | The corp operates in a sector the government has designated strategic. | 48 turns. |
| Monopoly | The corp holds 75% or more of a national sector market. | 48 turns. |
| Supermajority vote | The legislature passes a taking with a two-thirds majority. | 48 turns. |
The notice window is counterplay. When a strategic, monopoly, or supermajority taking is filed, the target owner sees a pending notice and has those turns to respond before the taking completes. Financial-distress takings are immediate.
Each country starts with a set of default strategic sectors flavored to its economy (for example, defense and technology for the United States, financial and energy for the United Kingdom). A head of government can designate further sectors strategic through executive action or legislation.
Authority: who pulls the trigger#
There are two authority paths, and the path determines how much the state must pay.
Executive: fast and unilateral, available to the head of government for emergencies, but limited in reach and politically expensive when used as a seizure. Executive takings can apply discounted or token compensation.
Legislative: slow and durable. A taking enacted through a bill carries full statutory weight and is expected to pay a fair buyout. The supermajority path is a special legislative route that unlocks any target with a two-thirds vote.
Compensation tiers#
Shareholders are paid against the target's valuation, scaled by the tier the authority used.
| Tier | Shareholders receive | Typical path |
|---|---|---|
| Fair | Full valuation. | Legislative buyout. |
| Discounted | Half valuation. | Executive emergency. |
| Seizure | Nothing. | Executive seizure (maximum political cost). |
Compensation follows the world's market-system mode. Fresh worlds use plants: Fair compensation is 1.0x replacement-cost tangible book, with the Discounted and Seizure tiers applying their stated reductions. The legacy pre-plants path uses capitalized earnings and its historical 5x going-concern premium. Do not apply that 5x multiplier to plants valuation.
Investor confidence#
Every country carries an investor-confidence index from 0 to 100, healing toward a baseline of 70 a little each turn. Takings push it down: a fairly-paid buyout barely moves it, while an uncompensated seizure takes a large bite. A statist government pays less confidence for a taking; a market-liberal one pays more. Popular takings (rescuing a distressed firm, breaking up a monopoly) can even nudge public trust upward.
Confidence is not cosmetic. As it falls below baseline it feeds three real pressures:
- Expropriation risk drags private corporate margins (state-owned enterprises are exempt).
- Sovereign risk premium raises the interest rate the government pays on new debt.
- Founding surcharge raises the cost to incorporate a new company in that country, up to +25% at rock-bottom confidence.
Privatizing sends the opposite, pro-market signal and restores some confidence.
Operating a state-owned enterprise#
Once absorbed, sectors run under the National Corporation rather than as a sprawl of separate firms. SOE behavior is distinct from a private corp:
- Dynamic efficiency. Instead of a flat penalty, an SOE's margin drag scales with governance. A well-run, transparent, low-corruption state runs its enterprises close to private efficiency; a corrupt one bleeds margin.
- Public-service mandates. A National Corporation's sectors can be put under mandates that nudge state metrics (employment, infrastructure reliability, cost of living) at a small but compounding per-turn rate.
- Price controls. A price-controlled mandate trades extra margin drag for a stronger public-service contribution.
- Treasury backing. SOE operating profit is remitted into the national budget as public-enterprise revenue.
The finance minister (Secretary of the Treasury, Chancellor, and equivalents) manages the country's National Corporations: appointing CEOs, splitting a sector type off into its own named enterprise, and merging one back in.
For the full operating manual, covering the National Corporation page and its tabs, public-service mandates, the CEO's four operating levers, the two-actor financing model, treasury backing and remittance, dynamic efficiency, and state-ownership concentration, see the companion page on National Corporations.
Privatization#
Privatization is the inverse operation: the state carves a fraction of a sector out of the National Corporation into a brand-new corporation with its own name, then floats it by IPO or auction.
- Carve fraction of the National Corporation's holding in a sector is between 10% and 100% per spin-out. That's a separate cap from the anti-monopoly rule: a spun-out corp can never end up controlling more than 30% of the whole (state, sector-type) market, so a National Corp that dominates a market is forced into several separate spin-outs even though any single carve fraction could be as high as 100%.
- Golden share. The state may retain up to 40% of a spun-out corporation to keep a strategic foothold.
- Auctions run for a bid window of 48 turns.
- Cooldowns. A privatized corp cannot be re-nationalized for 168 turns, and a freshly absorbed sector cannot be privatized for 168 turns, preventing churn in either direction.
Political weight#
Nationalization is never free. Beyond investor confidence, a taking can cost regime legitimacy and government approval, scaled by how unpopular it is and by the government's ideological lean. Statist governments find takings cheaper and privatizations costlier; market-liberal governments find the reverse. Plan the politics before you plan the takeover.