What is a Shell Company?

What is a shell company?
A shell company is a structural component of a ratings tree. A shell is always created for a ratings tree that has at least one Bitsight-curated subsidiary (siblings).

Its key functionality is to serve as a structural container that represents the collective organization, without having or holding any infrastructure, assets, or attribution of its own. The shell does not contain directly attributed systems, domains, or IPs, and therefore cannot be used as a source or destination for infrastructure operations.

Because of this, shells have specific limitations, including:

• Assets cannot be added to a shell company.
• Probable infrastructure cannot be calculated for a shell, since this process depends on attributions that only exist on non-shell entities.
• Infrastructure change alerts cannot be set for shells, because they do not possess any direct infrastructure.

The shell’s purpose is to organize and aggregate information from its subsidiaries, enabling the representation of the overall organization while keeping the main company and its subsidiaries independent in terms of ratings and data. This allows a main company to exist as a distinct rated entity, even when it has multiple curated subsidiaries beneath it.

A shell can be distinguished from the main company through the terminology used in its naming scheme (such as “Group” or “Corporation”), as opposed to legal terminology (such as “Inc.”, “PLC”, or “LLC”). Learn more about shell company naming.

Examples

No Shell Example

With Shell Example