| Finding Company Information previous page June 12, 2003 Section 1. Introduction. In carrying out analytical support for their own companies, management accountants can and should benefit from efficient and effective access to company information on the Internet. The Management Accounting Information Center attempts to provide links that management accountants can use to quickly access useful company information. Information on companies accessible from the Management Accounting Information Center’s front page might be useful to management accountants for several reasons. Some of the reasons that I can think of include: 1. To benchmark financial results of one’s own company against other companies; 2. To obtain information, for analysis, on a major merger or acquisition candidate; 3. To identify companies that provide products or services that you need; 4. To analyze the financial and other results of a competitor, so that better management decisions can be made; 5. To access current and potential vendors and customers against various criteria such as financial and operational problems; and 6. To obtain address, telephone, e-mail, and other contact information. From the Management Accounting Information Center’s front page, clinking on the topic Financial results, SEC reporting, and other data on companies will bring you to many sites providing company information. This is the primary front page topic intended to link to company information. But, other topics on the front page can also lead to company information. Quite a bit of information can be obtained on banks at the topic Banking, debt, and cash management. Links to information on insurance companies can be found at the Insurance and risk management front-page topic. And a third topic, Journal and magazine articles on accounting and other business topics, allows you to search on-line newspapers, magazines, journals, and other publications where a lot of company information can be found. Therefore, for management accountants using the Management Accounting Information Center to look for company information on the Internet, a good point to start is at Financial results, SEC reporting, and other data on companies, but the researcher should also go into other front-page topics, for example, the ones identified in this paragraph. Closely related to the informational needs that management accountants might have for specific and detailed company information, is information on industrial sectors that the company falls into. A front-page topic, Industry sector trends, data, and statistics, is devoted to providing as many useful links on industry sector information as possible. Another front-page topic, Economic principles, data, and statistics, might also efficiently yield useful sector data. The front-page topic mentioned above, Journal and magazine articles on accounting and other business topics, might lead to industrial sector information. Because of the close association between company information and industry sector information, a second article, “Finding Industry Sector Information”, has been written to compliment and be read in conjunction with this article on finding company information. The article "Finding Industry Sector Information" can be accessed from the front page of the Management Accounting Information Center. This article on finding company information, and the article on finding industry sector information, is intended to help the researcher by providing details on what is available at the Management Accounting Information Center for finding information on the Internet. These two articles intend to provide examples of internet-accessible information that is available on a company. To help meet this goal of providing examples, a real, existing company has been selected. For the rest of this article and in the “Finding Industry Sector Information” article, information will be provided on this selected company. All of the links, from which information is obtained, are explained and provided in the two articles. All of these links are also accessible starting at the front page of the Management Accounting Information Center. These two articles will follow a logical search sequence in seeking the information that a management accountant might use. We will assume that the company being used here in these two articles, as an example, is the management accountant’s company. Our management accountant goals are to compare his (or her) company’s financial performance to the most important competitors, and to the company’s industrial sector(s) information. For the purpose of demonstration, we will assume that the management accountant knows absolutely nothing about his (her) own company, other than the name, and knows nothing about the competition and the industry sector(s) that the company is in. The management accountant’s company is Venture Industries, Inc., and because our analyst and researcher here is an accountant, the information that the researcher is seeking is information that can be counted - not necessary only financial information - but also quantitative information on such topics as fixed assets and operational and other performances. A main purpose of finding and assembling this information is to use it to compare to other sets of information and to analyze the results. A main purpose of the analysis is to help understand the information to help the company make better decisions about becoming more profitable. Section II. Finding Preliminary Information. We may know very little about the company that we are seeking information on. This section identifies several websites that are useful in obtaining what might be considered preliminary information. Perhaps, the initial step is that we should determine if a company is listed on stock market exchanges. Or in other words, is considered a pubic company, because it’s stock is sold to the public. We can do this very quickly by using a site such as www.quote.yahoo.com. From this site, you can look up quickly, using the company’s name, the stock symbol for the company. No stock symbol can be found for our management accountant’s Venture Industries, an indication that Venture Industries is a private company (generally, meaning that any stock that the company may have is not traded on a stock market exchange). Other possibilities, which we should consider, for the company having no stock symbol are that it is a subsidiary of a public company or it is a foreign company. At finance.yahoo.com/l, we can search both US and Canada stock markets for a stock symbol, as well as other world markets. If the company is a public company, the stock symbol will be useful to have later in further searching other databases with public company information. Not only can we get stock symbols at finance.yahoo.com/l, if our company is a public company, we can get other, preliminary information by searching on the stock symbol. Finding that Venture Industries apparently is a private company may mean that finding information on Venture Industries will be more difficult, then if Venture Industries was a public company. This depends a lot on the size of the company and other factors. Because public companies have to provide financial information to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which makes it public, this helps to insure getting information on public companies, versus no such guarantees for private companies. The Hoover’s online site, www.hoovers.com, will allow you to enter the company’s name and retrieve “capsule” information, a short overview on the company, if it is in the Hoover’s data base, which it most likely will be if it is a public company. The Hoover’s site includes a lot of private companies. Searching Hoover’s for Venture Industries leads to “capsule” information. Information provided includes the corporate headquarters address (Fraser, Michigan), the company’s website name, that the company is a leading maker of injection-molded plastic components for automotive OEMs, and that the company is owned by CEO Larry Winget. Top competition is identified as Johnson Controls, Lear, and Visteon. Links are provided to current news stories mentioning Venture Industries, to SEC filings, and to company press releases. A May 17, 2003 news article indicates that Venture Holdings Co., LLC, just filed Chapter 11. The only financial information that could be found at the Hoover site is that in 1999 Ventures Industries had $2.45 billion in revenues; in 2000, $2.40 billion; and in 2001, $1.86 billion. Useful information found is that Venture Industries is in the SIC code 3714, Motor Vehicle Parts and Accessories, category. This code will allow our management accountant to compare Venture Industries performance with other companies in this same industry sector. More information on SIC/NAICS codes and their use is provided in the “Finding Industry Sector Information”, which should be read in conjunction with this article. It is in relation to seeking industry sector data that SIC/NAICS code numbers are most relevant. Access to the Hoover information obtained so far is available without subscription. Hoover’s also provides more detailed information, but this requires subscription. Hoover’s maintains a similar site for British companies at www.hoovers.com/uk. (Hoover’s also maintains separate sites for Germany, France, Italy, and Spain companies – but these sites are in the native language.) The British government maintains a site at www.companieshouse.gov.uk/info that provides preliminary information on British companies. You need to know the company’s name (or some portion of it). Click here to go to next page. |