What happens to a company's data when it closes

When a company closes, its data does not disappear overnight. Repositories, design files, research results and operational records are part of what the company owns, and they can still be licensed. But left alone, they decay.

A study in Current Biology asked for the data behind 516 research papers and found the odds that it still existed fell by 17% for every year after publication. Closures are common too: US government figures show about two in three new business sites close within ten years.

Who can decide depends on the stage the company is at. While it is in administration or liquidation, an office-holder acts for it. In the UK, an administrator acts as the company's agent and has power to sell or otherwise dispose of its property. Liquidators have similar powers.

Timing matters. In the UK, once a company is dissolved, whatever it still owned passes to the Crown, so nobody else can license it afterwards. If an archive is worth something, the conversation should happen before dissolution.

It can be done. When a farm data company closed in 2024, its data sets and models were sold at auction to another agriculture company. And whoever takes on a closed company's data takes on its promises: the US Federal Trade Commission said any buyer of a bankrupt genetics company's customer data must keep that company's privacy commitments.

Any income goes to whoever holds the rights: the company, or for a closed company its estate, where creditors are paid before shareholders. Former founders cannot sign for a closed company, but they often know exactly what the archive holds and who to speak to, and can introduce it as a scout.

Other countries have their own office-holders and rules. The principle is similar, and the details are for the office-holder and their advisers to confirm.