Though with orks, trolls and magic how much reality you really need is open for debate. Anyway here's my take on SR megacorps>
Ten Truths of the Corporate World
1) The Big Ten don't make sense. The corporate-feudal system pioneered by the big megacorps sprung up during the VITAS outbreak. AAA megacorps and the corporate court started as a way for the 1% to secure resources and ride out the apocalypse. Humanity survived. The big ten are legacy organizations.
2) Most megacorps have two levels of stock. The higher level includes voting shares, shares with enough voting rights attached that they might have some say in the governance of the company. Common shares, in practice, include only a right to share in profits. The common shares of some megacorps include a level of voting rights. Taken together, all outstanding common shares are unlikely to equal the voting rights of one on the corp board members preferred shares. By real world standards, most megacorps are closely held companies.
3) The Big Ten are conglomerates. Here's how it works. Stock of one of the big megas trades at, lets say 20 times earnings. Stock in another company trades at around 15 times earnings. The mega offers to buy the other corporation in a stock swap. This adds the earnings of the acquired corporation to the mega. The mega paid 15 times earnings, in stock, to acquire the other corporation. Now that the other corporations earnings are part of the megas earnings, the megas shareholders value it at 20 times earnings (Megacorp stock value = Megacorp Earnings * 20; Corp B stock value = corp b earnings *15; Price to acquire corp B = 15 * CorpB earnings in megacorp stock; new stock value = (Megacorp + CorpB) * 20).
4) Extraterritoriality are the reasons this works. The conglomerates of the 1970s collapsed when investors ceased being willing to value the conglomerate more than its components (yes point 3 was a real things). In the shadowrun universe, really large corporations enjoy extra-territorial rights. Special rights mean that their is a reason that mega stock is more expensive than that of other companies.
5) Shadowrunners are another reason for the difference. When the big company gets to beat up on smaller companies without the smaller companies really being able to do much about it, it makes the big companies stock worth more.
6) AAA megas have anemic profit growth. Trying to be a government has never been a profitable undertaking for a corporation. AAA megas are large and unwieldy. It would make more sense to break them into several smaller corporations. Political considerations keep this from happening. AA corporations are the largest corporations likely to hold even a passing similarity to how a real life corporation operates.
7) The Nuyen was a mistake. An international uber currency that never suffers from inflation sounds good in theory. In practice this results in deflation. Of course, if you ask the corporate court, their is no deflation. Instead items are ranked into six categories by their sophistication. As items move down the path towards obsolete their rated device rating drops. To show that their is no deflation, ever increasingly more sophisticated - limited run - items are listed at the top of the chart. Basically, the corps are pushing out expensive prototype items to keep prices up at the higher device levels. Two decades ago device rating 4 might have been a mid-range consumer item. Today its one step out of the bleeding edge prototype stages. This is why legal items have both a price and an availability. Goods with high availability scores are limited run, pre-mass production items. Waiting lists for goods explain why you can't just go onto the Matrix and order a Fairlight comlink. If you took the limited run items out of the equation and used something that resembles a proper weighting, then the world has been in deflation for a long time.
Nuyen are created by extracting non-renewable resources from the environment. In the real world, central banks increase the money supply by buying bonds. In keeping with the Corporate Courts hard money policies, additional Nuyen is created by the court and used to buy natural resources on the open market. These resources are then sold to extraterritorial corporations at a loss. The size of the loss becomes the amount of new Nuyen created. So next time you see a strip mine that is drekking up the astral keep in mind that you're looking at how money is created chummer.
9) There is (almost) no per capita GDP growth. Per capita GDP means the portion of GDP that any individual person has. VITAS killed a substantial percentage of the worlds population. Like after many plagues, their is a population rebound underway. If you look at official figures, the population of SINers have been, mostly, stable. The SINless, especially Orks and other metatypes with a high birth rate, have been expanding. The SINless are not counted in per capita GDP. On paper it looks like there is modest growth. If all Sapients were properly counted, this wouldn't be the case.
10) If things got better, the entire system would probably fall apart. The Shadowrun universe suffers from chronic slow economic growth. If things ever got better, the economic and political infrastructure that has grown up would, probably, crash.
