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A privately held company or close corporation is a business company owned either by non-governmental organizations or by a relatively small number of shareholders or company members which does not offer or trade its company stock (shares) to the general public on the stock market exchanges, but rather the company's stock is offered, owned and traded or exchanged privately. More ambiguous terms for a privately held company are unquoted company and unlisted company. Though less visible than their publicly traded counterparts, private companies have major importance in the world's economy. In 2008, the 441 largest private companies in the United States accounted for in revenues and employed 6.2 million people, according to Forbes. In 2005, using a substantially smaller pool size (22.7%) for comparison, the 339 companies on Forbes' survey of closely held U.S. businesses sold a trillion dollars' worth of goods and services (44%) and employed 4 million people. In 2004, the Forbes' count of privately held U.S. businesses with at least $1 billion in revenue was 305. Cargill, Koch Industries, Bechtel, Publix, Pilot Corp., Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (one of the members of the Big Four accounting firms), Hearst Corporation, S. C. Johnson, and Mars are among the largest privately held companies in the United States. KPMG, the UK accounting firms Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers, IKEA, Trafigura, J C Bamford Excavators (JCB), Lidl, Aldi, LEGO, Bosch, Rolex and Victorinox are some examples of Europe's largest privately held companies. ==State ownership vs. private ownership== In the broadest sense, the term private corporation refers to any business not owned by the state. This usage is often found in former communist countries to differentiate from former state-owned enterprises, but it may be used anywhere when contrasting to a state-owned company. In the United States, the term privately held company is more often used to describe for-profit enterprises whose shares are not traded on the stock market. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Privately held company」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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