Friday, January 06, 2006

Changes to Companies/Markets in Factiva

In December Factiva made significant changes in the information offered in their Companies/Markets pages. They have removed all content from Hoover’s and added content from their joint venture partner, Reuters. What does this mean?

· Private company profiles will no longer be available.
· Public company coverage has been expanded. An additional 5,000 public company profiles have been added from Reuters. Factiva is now a good source for foreign company profiles.
· Datamonitor is providing the business descriptions in the company snapshots.
· Company screening is no longer available.
· Peer group lists are limited to public companies. The peer group is a list of the closest 10 global competitors based on sales.
· Links to company snapshots are available from the peer group lists.
· You can search for company snapshots by RIC code (Reuters Instrument Code) as well as company name or ticker.

2 comments:

Stephen Francoeur said...

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that Factiva remains the only database that allows us to run a company-to-industry comparison report, right?

What print sources can this be done in?

Stephen Francoeur said...

To answer my own question (above), I have now found out from asking various colleagues here that, yes, Factiva is the only database that allows you to run a company-to-industry comparison report. As far as print sources for finding industry rations, see the section of the Industry Subject guide that deals with "Ratio Analysis" for the details on the print reference books to use.