Définition
Profiling a group of companies consists in defining within it the economic enterprises within the meaning of the Law on the modernisation of the economy. This involves defining statistical units, possibly different from the group, which may be the "operational divisions" of the group, or subgroups, or ad hoc divisions defined then in collaboration with the group itself which meet the criteria of the LME.
These companies must constitute an organisational unit for the production of goods and services with a certain degree of decision-making autonomy, in particular for the allocation of its current resources.
This operation, called "profiling", is justified in the case of large groups operating in several fields of activity. The units thus defined, restricted to the French economic territory in the case of a multinational group, constitute companies.
Remarque
The large groups are shaped in close cooperation with the groups themselves and may give rise to several companies; the other groups will undergo so-called "automatic" profiling and will be considered as defining a single company.