Is the relation between a company and its legal successor always reflected in a bidirectional way?

Learn how our Data API ensures traceability by linking each data point to official sources.

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 to its successor B but no derivable evidence of a relation between company B to its predecessor A, the API will only reflect one direction of the relation.

This intended behavior ensures the traceability of our data and prevents undesired aftereffects in case of potentially invalid data points.

Example: A company moves from city A to city B. City A publishes a record that reflects the company’s old register number and the new register number of city B. At the same time city B publishes a record that anounces the company’s new register number of 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 keep on decoding the associated data sources wherever it is possible.