The sector playbooks: each industry's signature tax move, in one place

The tools are the same across the economy: price your internal trades, park your patents and brands offshore, load debt where the tax is high, route money through a conduit. What changes from one industry to the next is which tool does the heavy lifting, and what the sector ends up paying as a result. This is the map. Each page below takes one sector, names its signature move, and gives you the rate it actually pays, sourced.

We have already explained the tools themselves. How they do it walks through transfer pricing, IP routing, debt stripping and conduits, one mechanism at a time. The structures, A to Z covers the named arrangements, the Double Irish and the rest. This section does something different. It asks: given the same toolbox, why does a tech company's tax position look nothing like an oil company's, and what does each actually pay?

The short answer is that the tool that works best depends on where the value sits. If your value is a line of code or a brand name, you move it. If your value is a barrel of oil in the ground, you cannot move the barrel, so you mis-price the sale of it instead. If you are a bank, your product is money, so you move profit with internal loans, and you also happen to be the plumbing every other sector uses. The sector decides the method.

The one-line version of each sector

• Technology and digital platforms. Signature move: own the software, algorithms and brand in a low-tax entity, charge every operating company a royalty to use them, and book platform sales through a low-tax hub. The six largest US technology firms paid a cash tax rate of about 18.8% over the decade to 2024, against an average statutory rate of 29.7% combined US federal-plus-state and about 27% worldwide.
• Pharmaceuticals and life sciences. Signature move: a single blockbuster patent can be worth tens of billions and lives wherever you put it, so park it offshore and have the US and European arms pay royalties home. The seven largest US drugmakers had a combined US tax liability in 2023 of negative $250 million.
• Extractives: oil, gas and mining. Signature move: you cannot move the mine, so you mis-price the commodity coming out of it through a trading hub in a low-tax country. The sector shifts a large share of its true profits out, with the leading academic estimate putting the figure at the upper end of a 12% to 35% range, and the harm lands hardest on the poorest countries: roughly $100 billion a year lost across the developing world.
• Finance and banking. Signature move: your product is money, so you shift profit with internal loans and hybrid instruments, booking profit where you employ nobody. And you are the infrastructure: banks build the structures every other sector uses. European banks booked about 14% of their profits in tax havens.
• Retail, consumer brands and franchising. Signature move: the one your high street feels. License your own brand and recipes from a low-tax entity, charge every shop a royalty to use them, and a genuinely profitable business reports losses where the tills actually ring. A global coffee chain paid around GBP 8.6 million in UK corporation tax across 14 years.

Why we split it this way

Two reasons. First, because lumping every industry together hides the mechanism. "Multinationals avoid tax" is true but useless; "an oil major mis-prices the crude leaving Nigeria through a Swiss trading desk" is something you can check and act on. Second, because the felt cost differs by sector. The retail page is the one a corner-shop owner recognises instinctively, because the competitor is on the same street. The extractives page is about money taken from countries that can least afford the loss. Same toolbox, very different consequences.

A note on what these pages are not. They are not accusations that an industry breaks the law. With the narrow exceptions of cases already on the public record, where a court, a regulator, a Parliamentary inquiry or a company's own filings put a name there first, we describe the method, not the firm. The system is in the dock, not the companies following its rules.