Market research: Companies

Companies

For national and international company profiles. Information such as company overview, SWOT analysis, and competitive postition.

Online resources

If you can't find a profile for the company or industry you're researching in one of the market research databases, or if you want to extend your research, try looking for case studies.

The journal databases Business Source Premier, ABI Inform and Emerald (available via the A-Z) have an option for limiting your search by publication type to case studies.

For very current information on a company, and perhaps for information about what the company is doing in local areas, search for newspaper and magazine articles. 

Use the News search on the homepage in Nexis to search for newspaper articles, or search FT.com for Financial Times articles (use the link on the Markets tab to set up an FT.com account). 

Business Source Premier, listed on the A-Z, contains trade magazines as well as academic journals and you can limit your search to only results from these publications.

Some company financial data is included in the company reports in the market research databases. 

For more in depth information, including a wider range of data, including historical data, use the databases listed on the "Company and financial data" page of our "Data and statistics" guide.

How to find company reports

You may need to look in several databases to find a report on the company you are researching. You may also find it useful to read reports from several different databases, to find more information on the company.

Passport contains reports published by Euromonitor. It has both local (country) and global company profiles. How to find a company report in Passport.

Business Source Premier includes a link directly to an A-Z list of company profiles in this database, which you can search or browse. Reports are published by MarketLine.

Mintel doesn't have company reports, but many of the market reports include lengthy sections on relevant companies. Search for the company name to find a relevant report, and once you're in the report, look for the Companies section.

Which company are you searching for?

If you can’t find any information on a company, maybe you're searching for the brand name. You can usually find the official company name in the copyright section at the bottom of their website, or in the About us section.
 
Some brands have several companies, for different areas of their business.  Look in market research reports to learn more about the different companies.