User blog comment:FortunePayback/Penny's Faction/@comment-3257939-20140612034127/@comment-3257939-20140612163953

Thank you for your sarcasm Zolnir, you got my point. It's really really REALLY unlikely that Penny's faction is the Schnee Dust Company. Like you said Darkcloud: "they could have branched out from their original goals of harvesting Dust into other ventures."

Yes, every big company does that to sustain themselves with some extra money and advertising. But only things like toothpaste, not building robots, that is a big job for another company which focus on that kind of job. While the SDC focuses on harvesting dust, other companies focus on things like making buildings, creating robots, creating weapons, just because it's the only Company we know so far doesn't mean they are the only ones out there.

It's like Miles and Kerry said: "Just because the show is named RWBY doesn't mean they are the only team out there." And so Team JNPR was given a higher role in the series, besides, if there is something like a high class district in Remnant, obviously, the whole place doesn't belong to the SDC and their families. It holds place for other companies and rich people, not just one. And the final reason is that Penny never explicitly states that she's not from Vale but she did gave that hint when she said: "I'm here to fight in the tournament". Which is a hint that she wasn't there before the tournament so she's from somewhere else and the SDC is from Vale, that's for sure.