Lilambd/world-firms

World Firms & Products Ledger

Every legal entity with a Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), how they own each other, what industries they sit in, and which brand owners put which products on shelves in which countries. Built by Lilambd from measured public registries, one file per question, every row carrying its source. Refreshed monthly.

What makes it different: this is not scraped text or generated prose. Every count is a measurement of an official registry or a community product database at a stated date, and every table says where it came from.

Snapshot (2026-11-03)

Measure	Value
Legal entities with an LEI (sole proprietors removed)	3,349,848
...of which registration ISSUED (kept up to date)	1,909,573 (57%)
Sole proprietors removed (they are natural persons)	132,532
Parent/child relationship edges	492,310
Entities that report an ultimate parent	133,537 (4.0%)
...of which the parent sits in another country	53,555 (40%)
Wikidata companies linked to an LEI	53,206
Japanese EDINET filers matched to an LEI	1,210 (789 listed)
Products in Open Food / Products / Beauty / Pet Food Facts	5,009,965
Brands with >= 3 products	129,759

Things the numbers show:

• Most entities do not say who owns them. Only 4.0% report an ultimate parent. The top reasons given for not reporting a direct parent: "natural persons" (1.12M), "non-consolidating" (1.08M), "no known person" (0.67M).
• China has 106,814 LEIs but only 2,451 are current (2.3%). Most lapsed after the first registration.
• India registers the most new LEIs in 2026 (58,346 so far), ahead of the US (24,423).
• The largest cross-border ownership link is UK entities owned from the US (1,712), then India <- US (961), US <- Germany (736), Netherlands <- US and Cayman <- US (735 each).
• Largest groups by number of LEI-registered descendants: Morgan Stanley 1,018, Bank of America 760, Citigroup 748 (in 68 countries), Siemens 573 (72 countries).

Files

File	Rows	What it is	Source	License
entities.parquet	3,349,848	One row per LEI: legal name, jurisdiction, category, ELF legal form, status, legal/HQ country-region-city, registration authority id, dates	GLEIF Golden Copy	CC0
relationships.parquet	492,310	Direct / ultimate parent and fund-manager links with period, accounting standard, validation	GLEIF RR	CC0
exceptions.parquet	6,198,241	Why a parent is not reported (reason code only)	GLEIF Reporting Exceptions	CC0
mapping_isin/bic/mic/oc.parquet	9.4M / 39k / 1k / 762k	LEI to securities, SWIFT, exchange and OpenCorporates ids	GLEIF mappings	CC0
wikidata_firms.parquet	53,206	LEI-holding companies on Wikidata, one row per item: lei_primary (first LEI), industry, products made, parent, inception, employees, revenue, exchange, website	Wikidata	CC0
wikidata_firm_leis.parquet	53,529	Every Wikidata item-to-LEI pair (303 items carry more than one LEI)	Wikidata	CC0
edinet_lei.csv	8,177	Japanese EDINET filers (corporate number, listing, industry) with LEI where it matches	EDINET code list + GLEIF	PDL 1.0 (EDINET) / CC0
aggregates/by_country.csv	235	LEI counts by country: status, category, parent-reporting share, exception reasons	GLEIF	CC0
aggregates/by_legal_form.csv	2,459	Counts by ISO 20275 legal form	GLEIF	CC0
aggregates/country_ownership_flows.csv	3,225	Child country -> ultimate-parent country counts	GLEIF	CC0
aggregates/parent_graph_stats.csv	2,000	Largest groups: descendants and countries reached	GLEIF	CC0
aggregates/new_lei_monthly.csv	19,308	New LEIs per month per country since 2012	GLEIF	CC0
aggregates/industry_country_counts_wikidata.csv	39,043	Wikidata items by industry x country (all items, not only LEI holders)	Wikidata	CC0
aggregates/by_country_industry_wikidata.csv	5,314	LEI-holding Wikidata companies by country x industry	Wikidata	CC0
products/off_country_summary.parquet	226	Products, brands, brand owners and categories per country of sale	Open Food Facts family	ODbL 1.0
products/off_category_country.parquet	60,058	Products, brands and brand owners per category x country	Open Food Facts family	ODbL 1.0
products/off_category_global.parquet	20,478	Products, brands and brand owners per category, worldwide	Open Food Facts family	ODbL 1.0
products/off_brands.parquet	129,759	Brands with >= 3 products: owner, top category, countries	Open Food Facts family	ODbL 1.0
products/off_brand_owners.parquet	10,236	Brand owners: products, brands, top category, countries of sale	Open Food Facts family	ODbL 1.0
products/brand_owner_lei.csv	10,236	Brand owners matched to an LEI by normalised exact name (2,042 matched), with the ultimate parent	Open Food Facts family x GLEIF	ODbL 1.0 / CC0

Rules this ledger keeps

• No personal data. Sole proprietors are dropped (with their edges and mappings). No officers, directors, founders or contact people. Street lines and postcodes are dropped; addresses stop at city. Wikidata items that are humans are excluded. Product files contain no contributor ids.
• Every row has a source column naming the registry and its publication date, and a license column (CC0-1.0, ODbL-1.0, or PDL-1.0 (EDINET) + CC0-1.0 (GLEIF) / ODbL-1.0 (product side) + CC0-1.0 (GLEIF side) for the joined tables).
• Unknown stays unknown. Empty means "not recorded at the source", never zero.

Known limits

• An LEI is only needed for financial-market activity, so small domestic firms are under-represented, and countries differ in how hard they push LEIs. Use counts as "registered with GLEIF", not as "all companies".
• Many Japanese LEIs carry the 12-digit company registration number (会社法人等番号) rather than the 13-digit corporate number; the EDINET match aligns both to 12 digits.
• Wikidata industry counts keep only industries that are Wikidata items (anonymous genid nodes are dropped). Labels are as written on Wikidata; some English labels are in French (e.g. NACE administration items).
• Open Food Facts is contributor-driven: France and the US dominate, and brand_owner is filled mostly from US GS1/USDA feeds. The products tables include only cells with >= 3 products.

Refresh

Monthly (2nd of each month): full GLEIF + Wikidata + EDINET rebuild, plus a per-country census via the GLEIF and Open Food Facts APIs.

Attribution

GLEIF Golden Copy and mappings (CC0) - gleif.org. Wikidata (CC0). EDINET code list, Financial Services Agency of Japan (Public Data License 1.0). Open Food Facts, Open Products Facts, Open Beauty Facts, Open Pet Food Facts (ODbL 1.0, contents DbCL) - openfoodfacts.org.

Built by Lilambd. Questions or custom cuts: research@lilambd.com