Corporate Affiliations and ReferenceUSA’s “Way Back” Machines

Web-based company directories have many advantages over their print counterparts, but in one area they frequently fall short; they rarely include historical information. Financial databases of public companies such as Bloomberg, Thomson One, and S&P COMPUSTAT will include extensive historical financial data, but if you are looking for a private company’s address, product line, or executive names as of 1995, you would do better with a 20 year run of a printed directory than with its current online counterpart.  This pattern is changing as information vendors become aware of the market for historical company data. Two examples of corporate directory archives are the historical research sections of Corporate Affiliations and ReferenceUSA.

Corporate Affiliations shows the corporate structure of more than 1 million public and private companies world-wide with subsidiary listings and corporate linkage.  For more information please see:  Private Company Research Part 2:  Corporate Affiliations. The Historical Research module of the database gives company addresses, products, SIC numbers, names of executives and directors, and key financial data for every year from 1993 to date. As the menu below indicates, you can search by company name, or screen by one or more variables. A company (ENRON, for example) does not have to be in business currently to be included in the historical file. To reach the Historical Search menu, follow this path from the main Corporate Affiliations’ menu:

Subscriber Tools => Historical Search

 

 

 

 

The record for Motorola Solutions, Inc. shows how the data is presented for a single company.  Clicking on the date tabs (‘1993’ etc.) will include the data for that year in the output.

 

The historical treatment of changes in SICs and product descriptions will include as many as 14 SIC numbers and descriptions for each company.

 

 

 

 

 

The company record for all years and all variables can be downloaded as a text .CSV format which EXCEL will read.

Here is the result of a screen for companies in Philadelphia in 1993.

 

The WEB display of the results is only a small fraction of the EXCEL record, which will give details for all variables (SIC, executive name, financial data, etc.). If the entire date range is requested, the downloaded record will list the companies alphabetically and then give variable details for each year.

However, there is a display limit of 1,000 records per search.  For example, a search for all companies in France with data for all years will produce a set of more than 1,000 records, but only 1,000 records from the set will be displayed.

ReferenceUSA’s current company directory contains 24 million U.S. company records plus records for an additional 1.5 million Canadian companies. The database’s historical businesses  module contains 151 million U.S. company records from 2003 through 2013.

To see the menu below:

U.S. Historical Business Database => Custom Search

 

 

 

 

 

 

For example, a screen for breweries (Primary NAICS 312120)  in Pennsylvania in 2003 will produce this display:

 

Clicking on an individual company name will display a record giving the 2003 address, phone, sales volume, employee size, SIC/NAICS codes, as well as graphs of sales volume and number of employees for all available years between 2003 and 2013.

Downloading the records in  EXCEL and requesting “detail” will display all the variables available for the company for the given year. However, there is a limit of 250 records per download.  Requesting all records for a company for the range of years (2003 – 2013) will give a line of data for each year. In this way, you can determine if a company changes its name during the ten year period. For example, the company listed as “Pittsburgh Brewing”  from 2003-2008 is listed as “Iron City Brewing” between 2009 and 2012 and then as “Pittsburgh Brewing” again in 2013.

Companies can be mapped by number of locations, employee or sales size and displayed as “heat maps”. For example, the heat maps below show the doubling of  the number of breweries in Pennsylvania  between 2003 and 2013 (from 27 locations to 69).

The  availability of  the “back files” of ReferenceUSA and Corporate Affiliations are an important step in filling the gap in digital historical directory information.

For additional information on company histories see this posting: Don’t Know Much About “Corporate” History.

Also see our Research Guides:  Company Information and Business History Resources.

 

Bloomberg’s PE: A Major Database for Private Equity

Private equity consists of firms and funds that make investments directly into private companies or conduct buyouts of public companies. Private equity, as the name implies, is not traded on public equity exchanges.

Bloomberg’s Private Equity (PE) database brings together data about PE firms, funds, investors and portfolios. In Bloomberg, type PE <GO> for this menu:

 

 

Search by Firm – Private equity firms are the general partners controlling the operations of the firm.

Search by Fund – Private equity firms direct their investments through one or more funds. Funds are associated with a specific investment strategy.  Venture Capital Funds, for example, are investments in startup firms and small businesses with perceived long-term growth potential. Here is a breakdown of the funds worldwide associated with a specific strategy that is available in Bloomberg.

Strategy           Percent of Total

==================

• Venture              28%
• Buyout               25%
• Growth                9%
• Debt                    8%
• Fund of Funds   10%
• Real Estate        13%
• Other                   8%

Search by Limited Partners – Limited partners are the source of investment funds. They include public and corporate pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, high net worth individuals, and sovereign wealth funds

Search by Deal – Deals can be classified as M&A investment, Joint venture, Spinoff, and Buyback, and then further sub classified as a PE buyout, Infrastructure, Real Asset, Real Estate, Secondary Transaction, or Venture Capital deal. Venture Capital deals include possible subdivisions into Seed, Angel, or Series (A to J).

The screen below shows a search for all PE deals in the past year that had targets in the alternative energy industry.

 

Search by Private Company – Bloomberg lists more than 15,000 companies in which PE firms invest.

• Clicking on the name of the company will display a record giving the name(s) of the PE firms which include the company in their portfolio, as well as additional information about the company. The record for U.S. Foods, for example, will show that it is held by KKR 2006 Fund.

In addition to its list of PE backed private companies, Bloomberg includes a database of 1.3 million private companies worldwide that are not PE backed.

Other useful features of Bloomberg’s PE include Funds in Market, which gives aggregate statistics by strategy, and Benchmarking and Fund Comparison, which allow the comparison of funds by such features as IRR (internal rate or return).

Take a look also at Bloomberg’s weekly Private Equity Brief

In addition to Bloomberg, the Penn Libraries have several additional databases that provide details of private equity activity. They include Thomson ONE, S&P Capital IQ (available at Lippincott in the Yablon Financial Resources Lab) , Preqin, and CB-Insights.

Also see our Research Guide:  Venture Capital and Private Equity.

For more information on Bloomberg see our Bloomberg Help Guide and additional posts in Datapoints under the Category:  Bloomberg.

The Long and Short of Preqin’s Hedge Fund Analyst Database

Sometimes called “Mutual Funds for the Superrich” hedge funds are aggressively managed investment portfolios that attempt to generate high returns through the use of strategies such as leverage, long, short and derivative positions.

Preqin’s Hedge Fund Analyst database provides a comprehensive over view of the hedge fund industry. It includes information on hedge fund performance, profiles, managers, fund items and controls. You can search by individual firm (manager) fund, or create lists of firms or funds with the characteristics you want.

For example, to find the ten largest hedge fund managers ranked by assets under management (AUM) click on Hedge Funds in Preqin’s main menu, then on Fund Managers, and finally on League Tables.

Parsing Business School Rankings

In March 2014, the Wharton Business School Community (University of Pennsylvania) was happy to learn that the School’s full-time MBA program was ranked first in the U.S. (along with Harvard and Stanford) by US News.

Since the first ranked list of 20 programs appeared in Business Week in 1988, there has been a proliferation of ranked lists. In addition to full-time MBA programs, there are now rankings of MBA programs world-wide, evening/part-time MBA programs, executive MBA programs, undergraduate business programs, and executive education.

ProwessDX – A NIFTY Database of India Company Financials

We’ve all heard of the NYSE and the S&P 500, but what are the BSE and the NIFTY?   

The ProwessDX database of Indian Company Financials has a few such unfamiliar acronyms. Once you get past them, you will find the database easy to navigate as well as comprehensive. Prowess is a database of the financial performance of 34,000 Indian companies. The database is updated continuously and typically covers the period 1990 on.

Annual Reports of companies and data available from India’s two largest stock exchanges (Bombay Stock Exchange, BSE, and the National Stock Exchange, NSE) are the principal sources of data. The database includes listed companies, unlisted public companies and private companies. Note: You will need to create a personal login account before searching. 

Search Prowess in Five Steps:

Step 1:  Choose the live (continuously updated) database, or a snapshot from March 2014 or December 2013. Prowess refers to these options as the database’s “vintage”.

Step 2: Select Data. The data may be either a pre-defined set, such as all companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange, an uploaded list of companies of your own choosing, or a created set using database identifiers.

Spelling out some of the acronyms will help clarify the choices in the menu below.

BSE = Companies in the Bombay Stock Exchange

NSE = Companies in the National Stock Exchange

SENSY – Companies in The Bombay Stock Exchange Index of 30 companies

NIFTY – Companies in The National Stock Exchange Index of 50 companies

COSPI = Companies in an Index of 2,312 Companies

Flappy Bird and Splashy Fish: Researching the Mobile Gaming Industry

In February, 2014, Dong Ngoyen removed his hugely successful mobile app, Flappy Bird, from the Internet claiming that he was concerned that the game was too addictive (Flappy Bird’s Demise: 10 Things to Know About the Game’s Rise, Fall).

Whatever Ngoyen’s motives, the removal of Flappy Bird caused hundreds of copycat games with names such as Flappy Bat, Splashy Fish, and Flappy Miley to spring up.  Apparently, making a mobile gaming app is fairly easy. Researching the industry is not very difficult, either.

The mobile gaming industry develops and publishes gaming apps for smartphones and mobile devices. Apps are typically sold in a special “app store” that can be accessed through the device. As a new and very specific industry, the Mobile Gaming Industry doesn’t have its own NAICS code or even standardized natural language indexing.

Mobile game(s), mobile gaming, mobile apps, smartphone gaming, and the more general digital games, are terms used by various sources. Finding stories about individual games when you know the name is no problem. For example, search Dow Jones Factiva for flappy bird in the lead paragraph (lp=flappy bird) to retrieve thousands of published items. Searching standard sources for industry information will often retrieve a general report on mobile apps that will have a subsection dealing with gaming.

Bloomberg Cuts through the Government Contract Maze

Bloomberg’s Government Spending module <BGS> is an important new tool designed to measure the effect of US contracts on a company’s outlook. Based on data from the 500 largest US Federal Government contract holders, the module displays prime contract orders for a company based on obligations posted by U.S. Federal Agencies. Details provided include key statistics, contract portfolio analysis, peer comparisons and quarterly trends.

To get access, type the ticker symbol into the command line, hit the Equity key, type BGS and hit Go. To search for Boeing’s US Government Contracts for example:

 BA US <EQUITY>  BGS  <GO>    

The tabs on the Overview Table allow the examination of different aspects of a company’s contracts. The “Contract Analysis” tab, for example, lists Boeing’s individual Government Contracts by their value, Government Agency, and start and end dates.

For a list of the companies receiving US Government Contracts, type:

 BGSD <Go>

For more information on doing business with the U.S. Government and with individual states, see this FAQ.

 

BRIC Works: Resources for Emerging Markets

The acronym BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) was coined in 2001 as a concise reference to the largest emerging markets. Since then, there has been a proliferation of Emerging Market acronyms. An “S” is sometimes added to BRIC to include South Africa. You can also find references to:

• MINTS (Malaysia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Thailand and Singapore)
• CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa)
• MIST (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea and Turkey)
• TIMP (Turkey, Indonesia, Mexico and the Philippines)

Although the rapid expansion of emerging market economies has slowed recently (see for example, The BRICs have Hit a Wall) there is still strong interest in uncovering emerging market economic, financial and marketing data. Here are four important data sources.

ISI Emerging Markets

Published by Euromoney Institutional Investor, ISI Emerging Markets gives full-text news (in English and in the original language), company and industry information, as well as general financial and economic data for 100 emerging market countries. The only notable gap in country coverage is Israel.

Business Monitor International

Although BMI reports on countries worldwide, the data it provides on emerging markets is especially useful.  Their coverage includes political risk, finance, economic indicators, macroeconomic performance, outlook and forecast, and the business operating environment. The breadth of coverage is indicated by their industry menu (shown at the right).

The depth of the reporting is revealed by the cover of this 140-page quarterly report on the Brazilian Oil and Gas Industry.

CEIC

The CEIC suite of databases provide time series data on 100 plus countries. Its Global and Sector databases cover more than 400,000 data items on topics including national accounts, government and public finance, demographic and labor markets, inflation, foreign trade, forex, financial markets, as well as data on a variety of industry sectors. Data are from national statistical sources. In addition, CEIC has a set of “premium” databases for Brazil, India, Russia, China and Indonesia that include greater detail.

Here are a few examples of the data granularity available from the premium CEIC files:

• Indian 15-year annual time series on electricity consumption by fuel type by industry and region.

• Chinese monthly real estate data at the city level for investment, building sales, and floor space.

• Average Russian gasoline price for high/low octane by month (shown below).

Bloomberg

Bloomberg, of course, is a comprehensive source of detailed financial data for all developed and developing markets. If you want a one page snap shot of the BRIC countries economic and financial markets, type:

BRIC <GO>

For a larger view of emerging market countries, type:

EMDB <GO>

Click on the Area Name in blue for an expanded list of countries.

For more sources on Emerging Markets, see our Business FAQ and our guides to specific areas and countries.

A League Table of Your Own

A League Table is a list of entities such as companies, teams, or individuals, ranked in order of achievement. In business, league tables most often refer to a list of investment banks ranked on the volume or value of such transactions as IPO’s or M&A deals. There are a very large number of combinations of league table variables (e.g. types of issues, country, time periods and currency). Here are descriptions of three financial databases that can help you construct a league table that fits your criteria.

(1) Bloomberg (available in Lippincott Library and Huntsman Hall)

Type LEAG and hit the green GO key.

The screen below is a list of investment banks ranked by amount of U.S. Bonds underwritten in 2013.

There are many customization options. Click on:

• Year (to choose dates from 1999 on)
• Period (to choose year, half year or quarter)
• Select a Market (to choose among markets for Debt, Equity, Structured Notes, and Syndicated Loans). You can also choose “custom markets” which will enable you to create a table based on detailed security, issuance and issuer data
• Related Functions (to choose among league tables for M&A, Legal Advisors, Clean Energy, Muni League, and to create a matrix table)
• View Ranks (to view a five year history and a detailed description of the table criteria)

Bloomberg also has hundreds of pre-formatted league tables with accompanying analysis. For a listing of these, type:

NI LEAG CRL and hit GO.

Bloomberg’s PAC-MAN: Tracking Company Campaign Contributions

Determining company and PAC (Political Action Committee) contributions to candidates is made easy with Bloomberg’s Campaign Finance module.

Type BGCF <GO>

Click to Enlarge

The series of screens below show the increasing detail available for election results by industry. The initial screen gives an industry sector breakdown showing the number of candidates who received at least $25,000 from individual company employees for each Sector ($25K+ Candidates) and the number of winning and losing candidates.

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Click to Expand

Clicking on a Sector will reveal the companies within the sector and their contributions.

Further detail is available at the company level showing individual candidate donation and external PAC recipients.

Use the left hand column of the initial screen (Monitor, Candidates, Donors PACS) to find information about specific companies and individuals. For example, to find contributions made by companies and PACS to individual Senators or Representatives, click on, for example, HOUSE (under the heading Candidates) and then on the name of a Representative. Search by company name to find donations by individual employees to candidates together with percentage of donation by party and office.

Bloomberg uses information supplied by the FEC – Federal Election Commission. Candidates for House and Senate are required to file with the FEC quarterly.

See our Business FAQ for other resources for corporate contributions to U.S. political parties.