Overview
Corporate Linkage reflects the reporting relationships among businesses in a corporation. Use corporate linkage to determine fiscal and legal responsibility for a corporation.
The Corporate Family
A Corporate Family includes a headquarters, subsidiary headquarters, and branch locations.
Data Model
The relationships between members of a corporate family are defined with the following attributes:
headquarters_id- The direct headquarters of this place in its corporate family.ancestor_headquarters_ids- The full list of all ancestors in the corporate family.ultimate_headquarters_id- The top-level headquarters of a corporate family.place_type- The type of place within a corporation.
Only some place_type values may belong to a corporate family:
| place_type | Part of corporate family? |
| headquarters | Yes |
| branch | Yes |
| kiosk | Sometimes |
| individual | No |
| independent | No |
Headquarters
Yum! Brands is a top level corporation:
| field | value |
infogroup_id | 959792284 (Yum! Brands Inc) |
place_type | headquarters |
headquarters_id | (blank) |
ancestor_headquarters_ids | (blank) |
Subsidiary Headquarters
Taco Bell is a corporation owned by Yum Brands:
| field | value |
infogroup_id | 200051886 (Taco Bell Corp) |
place_type | headquarters |
headquarters_id | 959792284 (Yum! Brands Inc) |
ancestor_headquarters_ids | 959792284 (Yum! Brands Inc) |
Branch Location
A Taco Bell branch location is owned by Taco Bell, which is owned by Yum! Brands.
| field | value |
infogroup_id | 258038298 (Taco Bell) |
place_type | branch |
headquarters_id | 200051886 (Taco Bell Corp) |
ancestor_headquarters_ids | 959792284 (Yum! Brands Inc), 200051886 (Taco Bell Corp) |
How Corporate Linkage is compiled
Our Corporate Linkage group maintains site-specific and corporate-level data for US and Canadian public companies, private parent companies, and the Fortune 1000. All subsidiary and branch locations are compiled for the entire corporate family.
Corporations are audited every 12 months. Additionally, our employees monitor press releases, Edgar documents, email alerts and RSS feeds to identify mergers & acquisitions, IPOs, openings & closings, executive changes, bankruptcies and rebrands.
Only operating companies are compiled. Subsidiary corporations which do not operate are not linked. If a branch or subsidiary corporation legally reports to a non-operating corporation, Data Axle links it to the next operating company in the corporate family tree.
Franchised Branches
Generally, corporate linkage reflects legal ownership, especially when the link occurs between two levels of headquarters in a corporation.
In the case of branches linked to a headquarters, the link might only represent a marketing affiliation, or a combination of legal ownership and marketing affiliation. For instance, many corporate franchises are not owned by the parent company, and are only affiliated with the parent company by the goods and services it provides.
Use the corporate_franchising to determine whether a branch is franchised.