Megacorporations

Megacorporations in the 21st century are massively global, with all but the smallest corps owning multiple subsidiaries and divisions around the world. They are superpowers, with the largest corporations having far more political, economic, and military power than even the most powerful nation-states.

Corporations are "ranked" by the amount of assets under their control, including materiel, personnel, and property, as well as profit. These ranks are A, AA, and AAA; with AAA corporations being top tier. Most corporations in the AA and AAA level are immune to domestic law, responsible only to themselves, and regulated only by the Corporate Court (whose seats are exclusively AAA companies). All AAA-rated and most AA-rated corporations also exhibit a privilege known as “extraterritoriality”, meaning that any land owned by the corp is sovereign territory only to the corp and immune to any laws of the country within.

The AAA corps, and numerous minor corporations, fight each other not only in the boardroom or with tricky deals, but with physical destruction, clandestine operations, hostile extraction or elimination of vital personnel, and other means of sabotage. Because no corporation wants to be held liable for damages, it has to be done by deniable assets: shadowrunners, invisible to the system where every citizen is tagged with a System Identification Number (SIN).