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Company Research

This guide introduces key resources and strategies for researching companies. It covers how to find company profiles, financial reports, annual filings, market performance, and news.

Company Research

Upward view of tall office buildings with glass and metal facades against a blue sky, symbolizing corporate and business environments.

"Office Buildings" by oatsy40 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

This guide covers various aspects of company research issues, including finding basic company information (name, address, telephone number, size of corporate staff, sales, products, services),  rank and standing of a company within an industry group (assets, net income, sales, number of employees) and finding data for in-depth corporate analysis.

Determine Corporate Structure

Is the company a public or a private corporation? Companies can be:

  • A proprietorship (owned by one person)
  • A partnership (owned jointly by two or more people)
  • A privately held corporation (company as a legal being but whose shares are not publicly available) or
  • A publicly held corporation (company as a legal being whose shares are publicly traded)

Publicly held corporations are required by law to disclose detailed company information. Therefore, researching large public corporations is much easier than researching any other form of company. Whether the company in question is public or private will determine the path to finding company information.

There are excellent sources for finding the structure of a company. The LexisNexis Corporate Affiliation (Print -Ref. Room - HG4057 .A219) includes basic information on listed companies. Other sources include the Standard and Poor’s Corporation Records (via NetAdvantage database), many corporate directories available via LexisNexis academics database, and Reference UAS database.