Finding how your subject company fits into a large enterprise structure may turn into an avocation with some companies, but I’ll tell you how to get started.
Begin by understanding the terminology, then in the case of Canada, realize that you will have difficulty recognising interlocking boards as you may not search corporate filings by director name. This leaves you with the immediate subject company as your starting point.
Typically, I start with Dun & Bradstreet Canadian Market Identifiers (DMI). The advantages of the DMI databases (there are several DMI databases) are the number of companies in the database (over 1.2 million), and no sales or asset threshold for inclusion in the database.
The most useful fields in this database are the Dun’s Numbers for the company and its Parent and Ultimate Domestic Parent. This identifies three levels of the overall enterprise to explore in one record. You will have the information on the subject company, and further searches will identify its immediate parent and the ultimate domestic parent.
I then search the D&B Who Owns Whom database for the Ultimate Domestic Parent to identify the foreign parent if one exists. If I find an Ultimate Global Parent, then I determine what my record cost will be by listing the companies in the family tree. Usually, I end up paying the lowest amount as there will be 25 or fewer companies in the family tree. I have never had to pay the full record cost because I have never come across an enterprise family with over 200 member companies.
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