Company intelligence platform, Beauhurst has revealed the complex structures that prevent governments, advisors and investors from seeing the full picture of the UK’s largest businesses.

Beauhurst, the UK’s leading platform for private company intelligence, has analysed the UK’s 100 largest businesses using True Companies. This newly launched data suite from Beauhurst enables firms, investors and public bodies to easily see the complete view of businesses as they actually operate, regardless of how many legal entities sit behind them.

The analysis shows that the UK’s 100 largest businesses are made up of more than 37,000 individual entities registered with Companies House, highlighting the challenge of understanding businesses through corporate registries alone.

Businesses often use multiple legal entities for regulatory and financial purposes, as well as to compartmentalise different areas of business and facilitate mergers and acquisitions, but this makes information much harder to obtain and consolidate. The analysis shows that some of the largest organisations are registered with Companies House as more than 3,800 individual entities.

True Companies connects fragmented information held across corporate registries, patents, grants, funding records, acquisitions, news and company websites to create a unified view of an organisation. This means that, for the first time, users can understand the full scale, activity and trajectory of a business in a single, unified view, without manually piecing together information spread across multiple entities and data sources.

Ordinarily, organisations that use data to research, track, or make decisions about businesses, and the markets they are a part of, must undertake a great deal of research if they are to understand fundamental information about businesses as a whole. This obscures how they truly operate, innovate, scale, and deploy capital, and it prevents advisory firms, investors, and local and central governments from seeing the full picture.

Toby Austin, Founder and CEO of Beauhurst, said:

“For decades, company intelligence has been constrained by legal entities, and our analysis with True Companies sets out the scale of the problem. A business’s employees, intellectual property, funding, acquisitions, financial performance and innovation activity are often spread across multiple entities and, as a result, some of the most important signals about a business are hidden in plain sight.

“Having multiple legal entities is useful for registration and compliance, but it’s not how people think about businesses and it’s not how economies work. True Companies changes that by connecting these entities and bringing together information from across multiple sources for the first time. This creates a complete picture of a business that opens up entirely new possibilities: Governments can gain a more accurate understanding of their economies. Investors can identify opportunities sooner, advisers can provide better guidance, and organisations can finally understand businesses as they actually exist, rather than as they appear on a registry.”

The research by Beauhurst also found that only 29 of the top 100 businesses hold patents in their primary legal entity, but more than 50 own patents elsewhere within their wider corporate structure. As a result, the patent activity of half of the UK’s largest businesses would be missed if only the parent company was viewed.

Additionally, nearly 90,000 UK businesses file their most meaningful financial data through subsidiary entities rather than their main registered company.

By creating a complete picture of how businesses are structured and operate, True Companies enables organisations to answer questions that were previously difficult or impossible to address accurately. Local and national governments can identify economic strengths and weaknesses within regions, track major employers, understand innovation clusters, and target support more effectively. Investors and advisers can identify emerging growth opportunities earlier, assess risk more accurately, and understand the full extent of a company’s activities, investments and intellectual property.

It also enables firms to evaluate risk, identify companies that are on a growth trajectory, and understand all aspects of a business so they can provide more timely and relevant guidance.

Through the unified business profiles that are enabled by True Companies, users can easily identify the complete financial information, key people, funding history, acquisitions, news, and patents across all of a business’s registered companies. Users will be able to access granular data at entity level and spot growth trends, innovation signals and expansion activity that would otherwise be hidden across disconnected entities.

True Companies is available to all Beauhurst subscribers now. The platform covers every company in the UK, Ireland and Germany, with further European expansion underway.

Visit www.beauhurst.com for more information.