A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #38: Corporations (II)

A brief overview of non-military U.S. corporations that trade in the UK.

Atlantic

A corporation based in New York.  Unlike most drucraft companies, they do not have a shaping department at all and their business is entirely financial.  They buy and sell the rights to Wells without ever leaving their offices or touching a sigl with their own hands.

Although a US corporation, Atlantic employs a lot of British traders and their London office has been running for longer than most UK companies have existed.  Due to this and their long-standing relationship with the Board, they’ve been able to get away with buying up more UK Wells than most foreign companies would be allowed to hold.  At the moment they hold one of the UK’s S-class Matter Wells.

Asmart

A subsidiary of a US retail giant.  They made headlines in the drucraft world in 2009 when they bought House Egmont’s Light S Well through one of their subsidiaries, becoming the first corporation in decades to displace a Great House.

Asmart is the dominant player on the UK drucraft scene – they sell about as many sigls by volume as their two nearest rivals combined.  For the most part they do this via quantity, not quality – they don’t sell many high-grade sigls, but they dominate the C- and D-class sigl markets by sheer volume.  They’re able to do this by undercutting virtually everyone else on price.  If you want any kind of basic low-rank sigl, the Asmart version is almost always going to be the cheapest one available.  Unfortunately, you get what you pay for, and Asmart sigls are notorious for poor quality and short lifespans.  Still, if you really need a particular sigl, and you’re working on a budget, Asmart can hook you up for less money than pretty much anyone else.  As a result, even people who hate them still buy their stuff.

As mentioned, Asmart hold a Light S Well, though if they sell S-rank sigls, they don’t advertise it.

YouHealth

The UK trade name of a US healthcare giant that specialises in medical drucraft.  If you live in the UK and want a Life sigl, there’s a pretty good chance that YouHealth will be the ones to supply it.  YouHealth are the dominant player in all areas of Life drucraft in the UK – locating Life Wells, shaping sigls from them, and supplying them to medical drucrafters.

YouHealth have a bad reputation in the drucraft world.  There are persistent rumours that they’ve built much of their medical expertise via highly unethical experiments in parts of the world where you can do medical trials without much regulation or oversight.  YouHealth are also notoriously trigger-happy with libel suits, however, so few people are willing to go on the record with such rumours.

Gladeshire McKeon

Another US financial company, Gladeshire McKeon work through intermediaries, subcontracting various drucraft operations and then packaging them under the Gladeshire McKeon brand.  They compete with the British Houses for the upper end of the sigl market – their sigls are typically somewhat more affordable, although despite their best efforts, they’ve never managed to build quite as good a reputation for quality.  Their reputation isn’t helped by their high turnover of upper management – Gladeshire McKeon executives usually only last a few years before being replaced, often in a very acrimonious way.

Voyager

A Silicon Valley startup that began in software and pivoted into drucraft.  They specialise in locating, and pioneered many of the features that are now standard in Well registration apps.  Other corporations were quick to copy Voyager’s innovations, so they were never able to dominate the market as thoroughly as they’d hoped, but Voyager were able to make a sizeable amount of money along the way.  Nowadays Voyager have taken a step back from locating and spend most of their efforts selling their technology and expertise to other drucraft corporations, playing off their rivals against one another for their own profit.