Company Activity

The Company Activity API provides insights into the industries in which a company operates. It includes primary and secondary industry codes, secondary company names, and institutional sector codes—giving a clear picture of a company's business activities. With just a company ID, you can quickly understand what type of business a company conducts. This helps organisations screen for high-risk industries, ensure values alignment, and identify potential partners, suppliers, or customers based on industry relevance.

Use Case:

• A B2B service provider uses the Business Classification API to filter out applicants in high-risk sectors and instead focus on industries that align with their sustainability values.
• A government department uses the company activity API to confirm that vendors operate in legitimate and expected industries. Suppliers involved in high-risk or unrelated business areas can be flagged before entering long-term public contracts.

Registered purpose and activity description

Registered purpose is called "vedtektsfestet formål" in Norwegian. This is how the company describes their purpose in their articles of association. Activity description is how the company textually has described what they actually do. The registered purpose and the activity description can be identical. In some cases, for companies that don't have ha registered purpose, there is only an activity description.

From 1st Sept2025, the Norwegian industry code standard is Norsk Standard for næringsgruppering (SN2025). It is a 5-digit subdivision of the 4-digit NACE rev 2.1 standard. The change affects all active companies. See: SN2025

Before 1st Sept 2025, the standard was called SN2007, see: SN2007

The correct text connected to the industry code is always present in the api response (in Norwegian).

The Norwegian industry codes are maintained yearly by Statistics Norway. They are used to produce statistics and are aimed to reflect the "production" in Norway.

Norwegian companies normally only have one industry code, but in some cases there may be additional "otherActivities". There may also be "supporting activities", when the company perform services for other group companies.

Main activity is provided in the Company Information API. Industry codes in full as well as supporting activities are provided in the Company Activity API.

For investment companies within company groups there is some special handling by Statistics Norway. If such an investment company also produces/trades or has any other activity, the industry code will reflect that activity. If they are exclusively holding/investment companies, they will get the same industry code as their parent. If they are the parent, they will get the main industry code of their child companies. In addition they will have a supporting IndustryCode which shows the real activity of the investment company, normally code 70.100 - Services for head office.

Read more in the links below, to the institutional sector code standard:

Norwegian

English