Closed Corporation

What Is Closed Corporation?

A closed corporation is a company whose shares are held by a select few individuals who are usually closely associated with the business.

Understanding Closed Corporation

By structuring as a closed corporation when incorporating, a partnership can benefit from liability protection without dramatically changing the way that the business operates. It can also offer companies greater flexibility in operations, as they are free from most reporting requirements and shareholder pressure.

Such a corporate business structure is known by a variety of other names, including the following:

They also may be referred to as "closely held," "unlisted," or "unquoted."

Closed corporations are not publicly traded on any stock exchanges and are thus closed to investment from the general public. Shares are often held by the owners or managers of the business and sometimes even their families. When a shareholder dies or has a desire to liquidate their position, the business or remaining shareholders will buy back the shares.

Because so few parties have ownership shares and no shares are publicly traded, there can be issues with liquidity. However, there also exists a built-in incentive to treat each shareholder, director, or officer fairly.

Closed Corporations Vs. Publicly Traded Companies

Publicly traded companies receive more attention than closed companies because of their listed status and the associated reporting requirements, such as annual reports. Closed companies have less of a reporting burden and thus less of an obligation to transparency. They are not required to publish financial statements or disclose their financial outlook.

This added level of secrecy can prevent competitors from learning about a company's plans and give closed corporations greater flexibility in how they operate. For example, they do not have to answer to shareholder actions or quarterly profit targets that could affect how they conduct business.

Raising money can be difficult for private firms: while they do have access to bank loans and some equity funding, their public counterparts can sell shares or raise money with bond offerings more easily.

Examples of Closed Corporations

There are closed corporations all over the world. They are involved in a wide variety of business pursuits, from retail and manufacturing to business services and financial services. Forbes's 2020 rankings of the largest U.S. private companies found that the largest is Koch Industries, a multinational involved in a variety of industries, such as manufacturing, trading, and investing. The company had $115 billion in revenue in 2020 with 120,000 employees.

Some of the other largest private companies are as follows:

Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, SC Johnson, Hearst Corporation, and Publix Super Markets, Inc. are other well-known U.S. closed corporations. Some examples of a non-U.S. closed corporation are Sweden's IKEA, Germany's ALDI and Bosch, and Denmark's LEGO.

There are some companies that went public, then at a later date decided to go back to being private again, and then even went back to being public. The best example of this is Dell Technologies (DELL), the computer company. Founder Michael Dell took the company public in 1988 and then went private in 2013. The company went public again in 2018.