Every week we pull the primary SIC code attached to each company in our tracked population and rank them by frequency. For most of the summer, the answer to “what’s the single most common code” was 82990, “other business support service activities not elsewhere classified” — a catch-all label we wrote about here on 3 August. This week that’s no longer true. The tracked population has grown to 940 companies, up from 650 when that earlier post ran, and the growth hasn’t been evenly spread across categories. The single most common SIC code today is 64209, “activities of other holding companies not elsewhere classified” — 53 companies, comfortably ahead of 82990’s 29.
That’s worth sitting with, because it isn’t just a ranking swap. It’s a change in what the most representative company in our dataset looks like. A business-support catch-all describes, however vaguely, a company that does something — some kind of service, unclassified. A holding-company code describes a company that doesn’t operate at all in the conventional sense; it exists to own shares in other companies. When that becomes the single largest group in a tracked population, the population is telling you something about corporate structure, not about industry.
The financial numbers make the point sharply. Companies coded 64209 average £61.4m in turnover — more than double our tracked-population average of £30.4m, and more than double the £23.1m average for the 82990 group they just overtook. Fifty-one of the 53 carry 64209 as their only SIC code, so this isn’t a case of a secondary classification adding nuance; for the large majority, “holding company” is the entire stated activity. A related code, 70100 (“activities of head offices”), adds another 16 companies averaging £40.5m — also well above the population mean. Put the two together and 69 of our 940 tracked companies, roughly one in fourteen, carry a primary SIC code that describes corporate structure rather than a market or service. Those 69 companies also skew toward the top of the turnover distribution, not the bottom.
That pattern tracks with what you’d expect once a business crosses a certain size: firms with £60m+ turnover are more likely to sit inside a multi-entity group — an operating subsidiary reporting up through a holding company, or a holding company itself filing at Companies House while the trading activity happens one or two levels down. It also means a SIC-based filter that’s screening for “what does this company do” will systematically miss the largest firms in a dataset like ours, because the largest firms are disproportionately the ones whose SIC code doesn’t answer that question at all. A procurement team scoping a supplier-risk review by industry code, or a credit analyst segmenting a portfolio by sector, needs a second signal — turnover, officer overlap, or the SIC codes of related entities — to see past the “holding company” label to what’s actually being done underneath it.
Construction remains the largest sector story in the strict sense: the six core construction codes we track (development of building projects, commercial and domestic construction, specialised construction, plumbing/HVAC installation) sum to 105 companies combined, still ahead of the 53-strong holding-company cluster taken alone. But construction is a real, if fragmented, industry signal spread across six codes; holding companies are a single code carrying more weight than any one of those construction categories individually. With 265 distinct SIC codes now represented across 940 companies, the dataset’s classification tail is long and thin — but its head, for the first time since we started tracking this weekly, is a structural label rather than a sector one. Worth watching whether that holds as the tracked population keeps growing, or whether it was simply this quarter’s intake skewing toward group-structure filings.