30,003 German corporations are bound to a parent company through a domination or profit transfer agreement. The affiliation mostly stays close to home: 64.5% of the subsidiaries whose parent is itself a German corporation have their registered office in the same town as the parent, 79.2% in the same federal state. This is the result of an analysis by HDH Group Research.
Contractual group affiliation is thus above all a phenomenon of the Mittelstand. The 7,548 agreements with a clearly identified parent company are distributed across 5,264 parent companies; 79.7% of them bind exactly one subsidiary. The typical case is a group in which an enterprise spins off sales, real estate or a location into a separate company.
Group subsidiaries are structured differently
Bound companies are organised with a greater division of labour than independent ones. 52.5% of them have registered power of attorney, compared with 14.8% of the others; 59.8% have a management of several people (30.2%). 31.6% of subsidiaries have a share capital of EUR 100,000 or more, but only 8.2% of independent companies.
The most densely interlinked sector is Energy supply, with 96.4 bound companies per thousand, where utilities spin off individual plants and grids into separate companies. Alongside contractual affiliation there is affiliation through shareholdings: 186,343 companies, 16.1% of the database, have the holding of participations as their corporate purpose.
The number of agreements has been rising for years. On average across 2023 to 2025, 616 agreements with a recorded date were concluded per year; in 2010 there were 181.
Method
The analysis covers recorded domination, profit transfer and profit and loss transfer agreements of German corporations as of 23 October 2026. Groups run solely through majority shareholdings are not included; the figures therefore describe a lower bound of interconnection.
The report
This item is based on the report “Group affiliation and shareholding structures” by HDH Group Research. It contains all figures and tables, the definition of the population and a section on method and limitations: Group affiliation and shareholding structures, also as PDF.
About HDH Group Research. HDH Group Research examines the structure of German corporations on the basis of its own complete database of more than one million companies. The results may be used freely provided the source is acknowledged.
Press enquiries and analyses to your own definition: info@hdhgroup.de, +43 664 2053061. The editorial team