Companies, Facilities & Ownership

Most trade questions start with a counterparty. Who is this supplier? Where do they operate? Who actually owns them? The supply chain graph answers those questions by representing the businesses you do business with as canonical companies, the legal entities and facilities beneath them, and the ownership relationships you can walk up to find ultimate owners.

Canonical companies, not legal entities

In Altana, a company is the brand-level corporate identity — the resolved representation of a business you would recognize by name — not any single legal entity, registration, or filing. A multinational like a familiar consumer-electronics maker might have hundreds of legal entities behind it: country-specific subsidiaries, franchise holders, sales operations, manufacturing arms, finance vehicles. Altana groups those legal entities, registrations, and trading names that belong to the same business into one canonical company. Activity, suppliers, ownership, and exposure all roll up to a single recognizable actor.

You also see the layer below. A legal entity is a single corporate registration — a subsidiary, a franchise, or a country-specific filing. Legal entities are the registered building blocks that compose a canonical company. Each carries its own jurisdictional identifiers, ownership stakes, and country of registration — which is distinct from where the company operates facilities or sources goods, and which is a primary input to sanctions, ownership, and trade-control screening.

Facilities

A facility is a physical place where a company operates — a plant, warehouse, port terminal, or other site that ships, receives, or produces goods. Facilities are first-class nodes in the graph and connect to the canonical companies that operate them. A single canonical company often operates many facilities, in many countries, sometimes alongside facilities operated by its subsidiaries.

Walking up the ownership chain

Above any canonical company sits its ownership chain — a directed sequence of parent and grandparent companies. Each hop in that chain is an ownership tier: tier 1 is the immediate owner, tier 2 is that owner's owner, and so on. Altana traces direct ownership up to nine tiers.

Two pieces sit at the top of the chain. The Global Ultimate Owner (GUO) is the corporate entity at the top of a company's worldwide ownership chain, determined by following control thresholds up through every parent until no further owner exceeds the threshold. The Domestic Ultimate Owner (DUO) is the corporate entity at the top of the chain within the company's own country of registration. And the Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) is a natural person — an individual, not a company — who ultimately owns or controls the legal entity.

Direct and indirect ownership

Altana represents two flavors of stake. Direct ownership is a recorded equity stake one company holds directly in another, expressed as a percentage. Indirect ownership is an ownership stake where source data confirms one company sits in another's ownership structure but does not enumerate every intermediate link — Altana surfaces an aggregate indirect stake so you can still flag control even when the precise chain isn't available. Beneficial ownership rolls these up: the people or entities that ultimately benefit from, or exercise control over, a company — even when they don't appear on registration documents.

You decide how much ownership matters by setting an ownership threshold: 25% for foreign-influenced-entity rules, 50% for the OFAC and BIS 50% rules, or any value you choose. Altana lets you apply the threshold to aggregate ownership, any single owner's stake, or both.

State-owned entities

A state-owned entity (SOE) is a company owned or controlled by a government. You can filter to SOE-flagged owners to surface suppliers whose ownership chains terminate in, or pass through, a state — a common starting point for foreign-entity-of-concern, sanctions, and national-security reviews.

How you'll see this in Altana

• Company profiles in Search open against the canonical company, with the legal entities, facilities, and ownership chain laid out.
• Search and director/shareholder search walk the graph by company, by individual, or by registration.
• Ownership workspaces let you set thresholds, filter SOE owners, and quantify exposure across an entire counterparty network.
• Shipment senders and receivers resolve to canonical companies, so the same counterparty shows the same activity no matter which legal entity appears on a given bill of lading.
• The ownership-based exposure page covers how these chains feed indirect-exposure determinations.

Related concepts