Privately held company
business with a small number of owners
A privately held company, or simply private company, is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in their respective listed markets. Instead, the company's shares are held and transferred privately and are not traded on public stock exchanges. Related terms include unlisted company and unquoted company.
Private companies are often less well-known than their publicly traded counterparts but still have major importance in the world's economy. For example, in 2008, the 441 largest private companies in the United States accounted for $1.8 trillion in revenues and employed 6.2 million people, according to Forbes.
A private enterprise is any non-government-owned business, whereas a privately held company is a company whose shares are not publicly traded. Therefore, private enterprises encompass both publicly traded and privately held companies, as their ownership is private rather than governmental.
State, private, and cooperative ownership
Private ownership of productive assets differs from state ownership or collective ownership (as in worker-owned companies). This usage is often found in former Eastern Bloc countries to differentiate from former state-owned enterprises, but it may be used anywhere in contrast to a state-owned or a collectively owned company.
In the United States, a privately held company refers to a business entity owned by private stakeholders, investors, or company founders, and its shares are not available for public purchase on stock exchanges.
The public source identifies “Privately held company” as business with a small number of owners. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Privately, company and business.
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This entry incorporates text from “Privately held company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.