Research Guides: BA 215: Language of Business Decision: Company Research

Best Bets for Company Research

Public Companies (U.S. and global)

Publicly-traded companies are relatively easy to research because they release financial and operational reports to the public on a regular basis, as required by the SEC.

Search by your company's name or its stock ticker symbol.

Mergent Online This link opens in a new window
Company information database containing profiles for more than 10,000 publicly traded U.S. companies, 17,000 public international firms, subsidiary structures, property holdings, and key competitors. Also includes up to 25 years of financial statements and annual reports, as well as segment results, restated financials, preliminary results and historical ratios.

Private Companies (start-ups, family businesses, etc.)

Private companies are often difficult to research because they are not legally required to release information about their finances or operations. PitchBook and similar services specialize in providing access to this specialized information.

PitchBook This link opens in a new window
Pitchbook features real time data to research and analyze companies, PE & VC deals, funds, investors, and service providers across the entire private investment lifecycle.

Pitchbook is available to authorized users of UO (full and part-time students, faculty, and staff).
To access this resource, you must have the UO VPN Client software running. Download and set up UO VPN here.
Click "more" for additional registration & access information.
First-time users, register for an account using your @uoregon.edu email address while on campus or connected remotely via VPN.
Note: Users are limited to 10 downloads per day and 25 downloads per month. (1 download = 1 row of data on an Excel file). Account access will automatically reset annually on June 30. Contact Genifer Snipes, gsnipes@uoregon.edu, for more information.
Paid for in cooperation with the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship.

Researching on the Company Website

Remember to use the target company's website in your research!

Company websites are fantastic resources for information on organization structure, corporate culture, product lines, business models, and other information.
If you have trouble getting past the product information, check the website headers and footers for links to subpages on hiring, company background, and other organizational topics.

Sub-page Searching Shortcuts

There are certain keywords and phrases you can use in internet searches to get to specific website sub-pages that are part of almost all public company websites (even if they're hard to find).

companyname investor relations > nike investor relations = http://investors.nikeinc.com
The Investor Relations page will include links to 10-K reports, corporate governance reports, and other stockholder-oriented information

companyname hiring > Maersk hiring = https://www.maersk.com/careers
Hiring pages are especially useful for the Internal Resources part of your project because they discuss corporate culture, employee benefits, organizational structure, and illustrate current hiring trends.

General Company Information

Mergent Intellect This link opens in a new window
Contains basic public and private company profiles on more than 20 million North American companies and over 70 million global companies including recent financial information, subsidiaries, key competitors, and executive profiles. Also includes First Research industry profiles for more than 1000 industry segments, Key Business Ratios, job search information, and more.
Statista This link opens in a new window
A statistics aggregator providing access to quantitative data on domestic and international media, business, politics, and other areas of interest.
Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Magazines, newspapers and journals in all business disciplines. Additional content includes case studies, investment research reports, industry reports, SWOT analyses and more.