Researching Private Companies

Private Companies

Private companies are more challenging to research, since they are not required to publish detailed financial statements or annual reports. When conducting research on private companies, you will not have access to annual reports, financials, analyst reports, or SWOT analyses. You will have to use article databases, business directories, the company's website, industry associations, and financial databases to name a few. In some cases, even these sources may not reveal much information. For resources to consult, click on the diagram below.

Subsidiaries

Companies can also own other companies, called subsidiaries. If the parent company is public, the parent company generally files the financials, and incorporates financial information from the subsidiary within its own results. If the parent company is private, no financials are filed for either the parent or the subsidiaries.

• Dirt Diggers Digest Guide to Strategic Corporate Research
• Open Corporates
  Contains information scraped from online corporate registers in more than 50 jurisdictions. The site allows searches by company name, country, director name and other keywords, with more than 400 million companies worldwide.