How Company Footprint works

The user passes a company as input and receives the physical operating footprint of that company as output: the active locations through which the company and its direct branches operate.

A company profile tells you who a business is. A footprint tells you where it actually operates: the offices, warehouses, factories, yards, stores, terminals, and other sites that make up its physical network.

Two endpoints are available, and both resolve the footprint the same way, so the two views always describe the same set of locations.

What it is for

To assess a supplier's or counterparty's operational presence. A single registered address says nothing about where a business manufactures, warehouses, or distributes. The footprint returns every known active site with its activity type, headcount, and revenue, which is what geographic concentration and resilience analysis actually needs.

To find a company's locations inside a territory you care about. Filter the footprint by country or by location type to answer questions such as whether a shipper has a facility you can service in France, or which of an operator's sites are distribution centres rather than offices.

To size a company's physical network and see how far it reaches. For larger businesses the footprint is itself a company-level attribute. A business running two facilities has a different operational profile from one running three hundred, even when the firmographics look alike. The summary endpoint gives you the total and the country split without paging through individual records.

What the footprint includes

The footprint starts from the company identified by veridion_id and includes:

1. Locations directly operated by that company.
2. Locations operated by its direct, first-level branches.
3. Branded affiliate, franchise, and licensed locations associated with either of the above.

Expansion follows the brand, and stops at one level

A branch is a company in its own right, representing the same brand as its parent within the same controlled company structure, typically a country or local operating company. A company owned by the same group but trading under a different brand is a separate company with a separate footprint.

Two rules govern expansion:

• It follows the brand, not the corporate ownership tree. A differently branded subsidiary is excluded, however it is held legally.
• It is not recursive. Only direct, first-level branches of the requested company are expanded.

Take a fictional coffee chain, Brewline, which runs one operating company per country and also owns a coffee machine manufacturer trading as Vantage Espresso:

Brewline International
├── Brewline Canada
├── Brewline Mexico
├── Brewline Japan
│   └── Brewline Korea
└── Vantage Espresso     (coffee machines, different brand)

Requesting a branch narrows the footprint. It does not change what a location is: the records returned are the same records, resolved from a different starting point.

Scope

The footprint returns the company's current, active locations. Sites a company has closed or moved out of are not returned.

It does not:

• return differently branded subsidiaries merely because they sit in the same corporate group;
• traverse branches recursively beyond the first level;
• expose the corporate ownership tree;
• accept legal entity IDs, only operational company IDs;
• return historical footprints;
• distinguish directly operated sites from affiliate or franchise sites.