COMPANY INFORMATION
MAJOR FIRMS IN AN INDUSTRY
SIC/NAICS CODES
MARKET SHARE
INDUSTRY SIZE
1. Where can one begin to find basic information about a Company?
The standard business directories are the best place to go first for quick, fundamental information on both publicly held and major private companies. Of course by publicly held is meant a firm/company that is traded on the stock exchanges, whereas a private company's equity is not traded and is privately held.
A more detailed description on researching a corporation can be had by going to the "Research Strategies" and "How to Find Company Information" sections of the Business Research Guides page on this website. In brief, however, the primary business directory databases to use will include: Hoover's Company Records, Standard & Poor's NetAdvantage, and Mergent Online.
2. How do I find out who are the major firms in a particular industry?
This information can be located in several ways. Perhaps the best and most thorough initial source would be a scan of the relevant industry sheet provided in the print publication, Mergent's Industry Review (Ref. HG 4961.M68--Latest at Information Desk). This source will provide a ranking of top companies in that segment by various factors, such as sales revenue or net income. Seaching by company in Hoover's or S&P's NetAdvantage will also produce names of competitors. The fifty or so survey analyses in Standard & Poor's Industry Surveys (Ref. HG 4961.S75), which are also available online in NetAdvantage, and which are revised every 6-9 months, provide both descriptive comparisons of major industry players and also statistical rankings by various financial ratios (eps, net income, etc.) Finally, one can look in such sources as
Business Rankings Annual (Ref. HF 5353.B86) or Market Share Reporter (Ref. HF 5410.M35).
SIC stands for "Standard Industrial Classification," a four-digit classification of all manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries developed by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. It was first introduced in the 1930s and until 1997 was the official scheme for categorizing business/commercial activity. The schema has been used in a host of publications, from business directories to market guides to business periodical indexes and databases. In 1997, a new system was introduced called the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), which was designed to be more accommodating of the newer types of business, e.g., services, and less confined to hard industry sectors. Books detailing both of these classifications are available in the Library's Reference Collection, and the systems may also be found on the website of the U.S. Census Bureau.
4. What about Market Share information or Rank within an Industry
Gathering information on you company's rank within the industry, its relative importance versus foreign competitors, or what is its market share, etc., can also be accomplished, to varying degrees of success, within the sources named above in point #2 above. Mergent's Industry Review is an excellent place to start for industry rankings. Market Share Reporter provides rankings and market share percentages that are extrapolated from various industry sources and from the business and trade periodical literature. Standard & Poor's NetAdvantage gives both market-capitalization rankings for firms in an industry and, in some cases, market share percentages in the relevant Industry Surveys report. In Industry Surveys, market share data will usually be found in the "Industry Profile" section. One does not always find a clear percentage breakdown, however. Some industries, like specialty retailing, are so very highly segmented that this information is less readily available. In such cases, if can be more common to find such facts as XYZ Company is number 2 in the business. It may be that one will have to be content with that; to some degree, estimates of a firm's market share or business ranking are different sides of the same coin. Searches on the open-internet will often generate results but the sources will typically be market research companies whose sites will often run into the many hundreds or thousands of dollars.
In many cases, however, the search for market share information can be quite difficult. The basic data can be non-existent in standard sources or quite elusive, or only available from expensive market-research firms. Sources are also likely to differ significantly in their data. In addition, there are problems both in defining a market and in defining it within the scope of an industry. For an excellent discussion of the problems in defining market share, see Michael Lavin's Business Information: How to Find It, How to Use IT, 2nd ed. (Ready Ref. HF 5356.L36 1992).
In discussing the method of comparing the sales of the major companies with their total industry sales, Lavin points out the immediate difficulties. Although this method is the easiest and most commonly used method for estimating market share, "unfortunately, it is also one of the least accurate techniques. The two main deficiencies of this method are related to one another. First, industry sales in most cases cannot be equated with product sales. And second, most companies are engaged in more than one industry--they make more than one type of product, or provide more than one type of service" (Lavin, p. 417). Allowances have to be made for these discrepancies, and attention has also to be paid to the level of concentration in a particular industry, the level of specialization, and the degree of diversification of companies.
A final option for finding market share information is to try to glean the data from trade periodicals. The way to do this is to search within an index database like ABI/INFORM or EBSCO's Business Source Elite for any mention of the industry name, e.g., "airline industry" and "market share." Searches in these systems will not infrequently pick up a mention of market share information extrapolated from other reliable sources such as industry analysts, trade associations, or market-research houses.
5. What about the SIZE of the Industry for a particular company?
An excellent source for assessing the relative size an importance of the industry in the national and world economies, plus recent trends and issues facing the firm and the industry is the above-mentioned Standard & Poor's Industry Surveys, located within the S&P NetAdvantage database. In addition, it is worth looking at two other publications: Encyclopedia of American Industries (5th ed. available online, earlier editions in the Library collection under the call number: HC 102.E53) and Encyclopedia of Global Industries (HD 2324.E53 [4th, 2007 ed. in Reference and eds. 2-3 in Library Stacks]). For the United States, one can go online to the U.S. Census Bureau's Economic Census series for such data as: number of establishments, sales receipts or shipments, payroll figures, number of paid employees, etc. Trade and industry association sources can also be invaluable. Yearbooks out by such associations (e.g., Ward's Automotive Yearbook (HD 9710.U5W3) or Aerospace Facts and Figures (TL 501.A818) or the Economic Report of the Air Transport Association) can often be a gold mine of data; sometimes these compilations are available free on the websites of these organizations. Two useful sources for identifying specialized industry association sources are S&P's Industry Surveys (see "Industry References" section in each article) and Encyclopedia of Business Information Sources (Ref. HF 5035.E53). For the world as a whole, statistics and comparisons are going to be somewhat more tentative. The Statistical Abstract of the United States does have an international statistics section which can be somewhat helpful. Data therein are drawn from such authoritative sources as the World Bank, IMF, OECD, and UN. For other international statistics, try the United Nation's UNdata, a new portal collecting all of the UN's various statistical databases.