What industries are there no small/obscure players?

[watchwolf49]

Credit Card Payment processors … VISA and Master Charge, any others?

[Shalmanese]

@watchwolf49

Credit Card Payment processors … VISA and Master Charge, any others?

Discover & Amex but yes, good example.

[gotpasswords]

[QUOTE=watchwolf49]
Credit Card Payment processors … VISA and Master Charge, any others?
[/QUOTE]

Dozens, probably at least 100, most of which are on the small side. VISA, MasterCard, Amex and Discover are brands of cards that may or may not do processing.

For CC processors, Leaders is huge, Fiserv, Card Systems, Concord and Heartland aren’t exactly small, then there’s smaller guys like PayPal, Chase Paymentech, BluePay, and Square.

And even with credit card brands, there are small players in the US market like JCB.

[Shalmanese]

@gotpasswords

Dozens, probably at least 100, most of which are on the small side. VISA, MasterCard, Amex and Discover are brands of cards that may or may not do processing.

For CC processors, Leaders is huge, Fiserv, Card Systems, Concord and Heartland aren’t exactly small, then there’s smaller guys like PayPal, Chase Paymentech, BluePay, and Square.

And even with credit card brands, there are small players in the US market like JCB.

I’m assuming watchwolf49 was referring to credit card networks. In the US, JCB uses the Discover network but it appears to run an independent network around the globe.

[oz0ne]

@jasg

Here is the site for the Lyon project.

Awesome. Thanks.

[coremelt]

@gotpasswords

And even with credit card brands, there are small players in the US market like JCB.

Yes but if you travel outside the US good luck getting any card accepted that isn’t Visa or Mastercard. Even Amex is not accepted in many places in Asia etc. Effectively Visa and Mastercard have a duopoly for overseas travel.

[Alba]

Stevia extract suppliers. Still quite a new product. I couldn’t find any small companies doing that. There are of course smaller farms, but there are only 4 suppliers.

http://www.just-food.com/management-briefing/from-cargill-to-purecircle_id118747.aspx

[slaphead]

@Shalmanese

I’m assuming watchwolf49 was referring to credit card networks. In the US, JCB uses the Discover network but it appears to run an independent network around the globe.

You’ve forgotten what is arguably the biggest of the lot - China UnionPay…

[Emerald_Hawk]

I’m not sure if it’s in the spirit of the OP, but there are some industries that are too small to support more than one or two companies. For example, there was only one pinball machine manufacturer for over ten years. Apparently a new one just opened according to In The World Of Pinball, An Underdog Takes On The Giant : NPR.

[yabob]

@HoneyBadgerDC

Tires might meet that criteria, I can’t think of any real small tire manufacturers.

Even if there aren’t any, there are a lot of major companies and brandnames (Bridgestone, Continental, Goodyear, Cooper, Pirelli, and Michelin are all separate companies, which own some more of the familiar names) so it doesn’t fit the more restrictive question of a couple of companies controlling the entire market.

That would imply that there are smaller companies about, and the wiki list of tire manufacturers agrees. There’s some definite small ones on this list, even if you consider manufacturers like Hankook and Kumho to be major:

List of tire companies

[Martini_Enfield]

@robert_columbia

I also recall that IBM and Fujitsu made hard disks, but I’m not sure if IBM actually made their disks in-house or if they were OEM’d.

I thought Samsung made their own HDDs too?