holding company

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A company controlling partial or complete interest in another company or other companies.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun (Finance) A company that controls other independently incorporated companies by ownership of most or all of their stock, but does not directly control the daily operations of those companies.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun business A company whose main purpose is to own shares of other companies as opposed to producing goods and services.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a company with controlling shares in other companies