Ownership graph

What you can use it for

Ownership in Norway is public information, but it sits scattered as lists of individual companies. The graph puts the pieces together so the structure is visible instead of having to be assembled by hand.

• Journalism and research: map who is behind a company, find where a group holds interests, and see whether apparently independent companies share owners.
• Due diligence and KYC: follow the ownership chain to the ultimate registered controller before entering agreements.
• Sales and prospecting: see the whole group a customer belongs to, not just the single legal entity.
• Analysis: understand how ownership is concentrated in an industry or a region.

Try the graph on well-known ownership structures

These companies have multi-level ownership structures that illustrate what the tool does. Click a node in the graph to expand it further.

How it works

The graph is built on the Shareholder Register and the Central Coordinating Register. Each node is a company or a person, and each edge is a registered ownership relationship with a percentage stake.

• Expand node by node. You start with one company and open the neighbours you care about, instead of downloading the whole register.
• Both directions. Upwards to the owners, downwards to the companies owned.
• Share and export. Every graph has a shareable link and can be downloaded as an image – for an article or a presentation, say.
• People and companies in the same map. Individual shareholders appear as their own nodes, so you can see when the same person recurs across companies.

For large companies with very many shareholders, the largest owners are shown first and lists are truncated to keep the graph readable. You can expand individual nodes to see more.

Limitations you should know about

The tool shows registered ownership. That is not the same as beneficial ownership in every case:

• Shareholder data exists mainly for limited companies (AS/ASA). Sole proprietorships, associations and foreign entities often have no registered shareholder list.
• Asset managers and nominee accounts can be listed as the owner on behalf of others. This applies especially to foreign banks on the shareholder register of listed companies.
• The register is updated periodically. Recent changes of ownership may be missing.

We always recommend checking critical findings against the primary source in the Brønnøysund registers before publishing.

Free for newsrooms

You may freely use the graph in research, and reproduce screenshots of it in articles and publications – without asking permission. We ask only for a clear attribution: “Source: Biztrac.no”, ideally with a link.

The underlying data is public and licensed under the Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data (NLOD).

Need a specific extract, or have questions about the method? Get in touch – we are happy to help newsrooms with source data.

See all press resources →

Related

• Connection search – find the link between two companies or people.
• The Ownership Map – analysis of who controls Norwegian companies overall.
• Company directory – the largest companies by municipality and industry.
• Rankings – rankings by revenue, headcount and profitability.