In 2008, the European Commission proposed a regulation for a new European private company, called the Societas Privata Europeaea. This proposal did not get unanimous approval and was therefore withdrawn after five years of attempt to find a compromise. In 2014, the European Commission proposed a directive on single-member private limited liability companies, called the Societas Unius Personae. The aims of the new proposal have a few similarities as the European private company, as will be mentioned in the introduction. However, the proposed directive introduces a few changes, which the European Commission hopes will make this proposal successful. The purpose with this thesis is mainly to examine whether there is a need of a new European company form on the market today. The conclusion is taken by examining who would benefit the most with this company form. This thesis contains an explanation of the proposed directive, a comparison between this new company form and the corresponding Swedish company, as well as opinions on this directive. In the end there is a discussion regarding this subject and lastly my conclusions. The result has shown that there are still great amount of uncertainties that are in need of further discussion in order for this proposal to eventually pass unanimous consent. My conclusions are that there is not an urgent need of a new European company form on the market right now. However, it is a work in progress, and I believe a European company form like this one is a good way towards the aim of uniting the Member States of the European Union.

The difference in valuation between private and public firms have been studied several times on the U.S. and European markets. However, we believe that the lack of studies made on the Swedish market opened a possibility for an exciting opportunity. The general conclusion drawn from the earlier studies is that there in fact does exist a discount on private companies compared to similar publicly traded ones and this study is going to examine whether this also applies on the Swedish market. After collecting data from acquisitions of private and public firms, each private firm is paired up with its closest public counterpart and the multiples are being compared. This resulted in a mean discount for private companies of 48%, 32% and 32% when comparing the EV/EBITDA, EV/Sales, and EV/Earnings multiples respectively confirming the existence of a Private Company Discount on the Swedish market.