Searching for company information on the Internet

Company reports

Remember that Wheatley Library has a collection of UK, European and International company reports, some of them dating back up to ten years; many of the services below only provide the current report. The FAME database provides financial details of all listed companies, and their subsidiaries and all private companies with a turnover over £700,000 or profits over £50,000. However, increasing numbers of company reports are available on the Internet.

Annual reports Library
Links to a variety of sites giving annual reports and information about them. Links to some very expensive fee based sites are included (which are therefore not included here). Make sure you explore all other avenues first!

Biz/ed
Also included in the the sections above, Biz/ed is listed here because it contains a section on company data.

FT Annual reports service
It is possible to order free copies of UK and USA companies annual reports subject to availability.

EDGAR
EDGAR contains the majority of documents filed by US quoted companies with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including annual reports and accounts or their equivalent. Downloading times are rapid. For example, the Ford Motor Co. report, approximately 100 pages, can be downloaded in 20 minutes. If made available commercially on CD-ROM, a publisher could easily charge several thousand dollars p.a. for all of the information on EDGAR. The SEC has faced concerted lobbying from the US information industry as a result, and its future as a free service is now under question. Apart from this, at the time of writing a major revision of the service is planned, and this will include removing all material over two years old.

Level Business Limited
Search, view and download UK company accounts and director information from Companies House records for free.

Northcote Internet Limited
This is an efficient site which is the best place to look for UK company reports. It provides links to all of the UK listed companies annual reports that are available via the internet. Searches can be made by name, or by searching the FTSE100 or FTSE All Share etc. lists.

AnnualReports.com
A US service providing UK company annual reports.

Company Histories
This link will take you to the British Library's collection of over 500 company histories. You will see a list of histories of British companies but not the texts themselves. You will need to use an interlibrary loan request to obtain these.

Finally, if nothing works, search all search engines using the company name with .com added.

Share Price Information

The following web sites provide share price information:

Charting UK Shares
This site has information in graph form on the FTSE 100, FTSE 250 and Techmark indices. Its focus is on the UK but you can get information on other world indices too. You can look at the movement of an index over a wide range of periods from one day up to five years and you can also find the moving average. You can search for an individual company by selecting the heading UK Share Prices and Movements. From the lefthand menu select Powercharts and type in a company name. Click the button to draw the chart. You can also find news items about your selected company.

Yahoo finance
This site has information relating to the UK FTSE 100 and FTSE 250. Click on "more" under "Related Information" for each listed stock to get historical prices.There is also international information available and in addition to market information you will find news and commentary.

BigCharts
This is a US based site which covers world markets. It includes research tools such as interactive charts, industry analysis and market news and commentary. Find the symbol for the company you want and then go to the 'Historical quotes' option. You can set a date and get the high, low, opening and closing quotes for that day. (Note that dates are shown in US format i.e. mm/dd/yy)

European Share Information
You can select information from a range of European stockmarkets and can choose to look at individual companies or market sectors and compare them and create charts. You can also choose the currency in which you want the price information displayed