Privately held company

A privately held firm, sometimes known as a private company, is a corporation that does not sell or trade its company stock (shares) to the general public on stock market exchanges, but instead offers, owns, trades, or exchanges its stock privately or over-the-counter in the market. The shareholders or members of a close corporation are a small group of people who work together to run the business. Closely held corporation, unquoted firm, and unlisted company are all phrases that are used in the same context.

Private enterprises play a significant role in the world's economy, despite the fact that they are less visible than their publicly listed counterparts. According to Forbes, the 441 biggest private firms in the United States generated sales of US$1,800,000,000,000 ($1.8 trillion) in 2008 and employed a total of 6.2 million people. The 339 firms on Forbes' study of tightly owned U.S. enterprises sold a trillion dollars' worth of products and services (44 percent) and employed four million people in 2005, despite the fact that the pool size was far lower (22.7 percent). In 2004, Forbes magazine published a list of 305 privately owned U.S. corporations having annual revenues of at least $1 billion.

Separately, any businesses that are not controlled by the government are referred to as private enterprises. In this view, both publicly listed and privately owned enterprises are included, since their investors are people who work outside of the corporate world.