Are relationships between companies and their legal successors always bidirectional?

Each data point provided by our Data API is strictly tied to at least one official data source that provides related evidence.

There are cases (especially in Germany, France and Switzerland) where official data sources lack relevant information or contain non-standardized wordings for legal facts. In such cases an automated derivation of relations between a company and its legal predecessor or successor might not be possible.

Therefore, if there is clear evidence of a relation between company A and its successor B but no derivable evidence of a relation between company B and its predecessor A, the API will only reflect one direction of the relation.

This intended behavior ensures the traceability of our data and prevents inconsistencies caused by potentially invalid data points.

Example: A company moves from city A to city B. City A publishes a record showing the company’s old register number and the new register number of city B. At the same time, city B publishes a record that announces the company’s new register number in city B but does not mention the former register number of city A. In this case, the register number of city A will have a relation to the register number of city B but not the other way around.

We are constantly improving the automated detection of historical relations between companies and will continue to analyze the associated data sources wherever possible.