Privatization - Notable Examples

Notable Examples

The largest privatization in history involved Japan Post. It was the nation's largest employer and one third of all Japanese government employees worked for Japan Post. Japan Post was often said to be the largest holder of personal savings in the world.

Japan Post was thought to be inefficient and a source for corruption. In September 2003, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's cabinet proposed splitting Japan Post into four separate companies: A bank, an insurance company, a postal service company, and a fourth company to handle the post offices as retail storefronts of the other three.

After the Upper House rejected privatization, Koizumi scheduled nationwide elections for September 11, 2005. He declared the election to be a referendum on postal privatization. Koizumi subsequently won this election, gaining the necessary supermajority and a mandate for reform, and in October 2005, the bill was passed to privatize Japan Post in 2007.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone's privatization in 1987 involved the largest share-offering in financial history at the time. Fifteen of the world's 20 largest public share offerings have been privatizations of telecoms.

The United Kingdom's largest public-share offerings were privatizations of British Telecom and British Gas during the 1980s under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, when many state-run firms were sold off to the private sector. This attracted very mixed views from the public and parliament, and even a former Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was critical of the policy; likening it to "selling the family silver". There were around 3,000,000 shareholders in Britain when Thatcher took office in 1979, but the subsequent sale of state-run firms saw the level of shareholders double to 6,000,000 by 1985 and by the time of her resignation as prime minister in 1990 there were more than 10,000,000 shareholders in Britain. However, by 2012 the influence of these small British shareholders over the overwhelmingly non-British owners (mainly the publicly owned French company EDF) of the firms that generate and distribute power in Britain is negligible.

The largest public-share offering in France was France Telecom.

Egypt undertook widespread privatization under President Hosni Mubarak. After his overthrow in the 2011 revolution, the association of the newly private businesses with the crony capitalism of the old regime along with the new look at long-festering labor and police-state issues have led to calls for re-nationalization.