 Hey there, Chad Bond, you're here for High University Libraries. If you're doing company research, you'll definitely want to check out Mergent Online. Mergent can be a little daunting when you first get there because there's so many different options of statistics, of financials, of all this kind of stuff to choose from. This video gets you started in some of the four key areas of looking at company information. You're going to look at company financials. You're going to look at comparing competitors. You're going to look at buyer and supplier information for some of your companies. And you're also going to look at stock reports or equity reports to get experts opinions on how your company is doing. So once again, this kind of covers the basics of quickly getting into Mergent Online, getting your feet wet, and understanding what kind of information you can find there. So here you go. So when you first arrive to Mergent, all you have to do is basically go in the company search tab here and start typing in your company. I'm actually going to look for Mattel. And you can see all I have to do is type in Matt and get pretty close to Mattel Incorporated. I'm going to click right there. It's going to take us to the Mattel snapshot page where we get a business summary. We can click on the executives there and get a biographical information, all that kind of good stuff, key financials, some recent news about the company, all that kind of good stuff. I just want to showcase about four different features in here. If you have limited time to use Mergent or limited time to do your research, I just want to show you quickly some key areas to look at. One is company financials. This will be where you can go in and look at your company financials. You can look at all sections here and get lots of information about your company. If you want to, you can go back as far as all available years. And typically this will go back in many cases to 30 years or so. Here we see basically this search for Mattel. We have information going on all the way back to looks like 1983, which in this case is way before some of my actual users were born, many of our college students were born after that. So that's when we can get company financials. You can download all this to excel and have the own data there for you to manipulate however you want to. Relating to company financials, you're probably going to look at competitors to see how your company compares to other competitors in the industry. In this case, Mergent has basically selected the best companies in there for you for this industry. If you want to, you can go and say, let's add an additional company. I'm just going to click on electronic and let's search for, I have to spell it correctly here, electronic. And let's say we want to compare to electronic arts, makers of Madden and all those kind of great games. We're going to click add and what this will do is we can actually add whatever companies we want to. If you want to get rid of somebody, we can get rid of this one world holdings or if we want to add Activision in here, we can go in and I'm just making up some companies here who might be sort of related to toys and games, but maybe not. This gives you an option to look at some key categories for competitor information. You can download this list to excel here. You can also, if you want something more advanced than the information that's available here, you can add all these to a company analysis list. And when you do so, this option here will be available to click on the company analysis list and that will take you to a screen that looks like this, where you're able to go in and either do a multiple company report or a comparison report. I like the comparison report because it actually allows you to make a big old list or table or Excel spreadsheet for all your companies. So we're going to click here to add all these guys over here under our company selection box. And then if we scroll down, we can add things like, let's go in our financials here and let's look for amounts, been on advertising. We can look at net income, right? We can look at total assets, all these kind of things that weren't in the total revenue, all these, whatever. We can get up to 30 report items in here. If we go into ratios, we can go over and see here is our, let's look at maybe operate margin and let's look for, let's, what else we want to do, net profit margin, right? If you want to, you can go over here and do an average. So it's going to basically create an average of all these areas or all these companies. So it's kind of a good way to kind of get a self-selected industry average or an average of peers. If you like, you can go over here and hit the, hit a date and go down and hit the shift key and grab all those dates if you wish just for the sake of keeping it neat for this video. I'm just going to do latest here. And if you go down and select a format, you can see there are options for HTML, Word, Excel, PDF. I'm just going to do HTML here for the demonstration here to create a report. And this will go in and do a report for you. You can see it will go in and give you all the information in most cases for, if it's available for those companies that we selected. So a great way to get quick information for your company based upon the criteria that you define. So having looked at competitor information and things like that, one area we might want to look at next would be buyer and supplier information. So we're going to go back to the main Mergent Online tab here and click on Horizon. And what Horizon will give you gives you competitor information, also customers and suppliers. You can look at like supply chain information, things like that. So just to give you an example, we'll look at suppliers here. And here's where we can see that the types of supplier relationships that Mattel has with other companies. In some cases, the relationship may be defined by other companies. So in this case, Quad Graphics Incorporated says that they make stuff for Mattel. In this case, it looks like probably catalogs or maybe some of the packaging for some of the toys and that sort of thing. In other cases, we look and see that Mattel defined that time water is impact a supplier. In this case, it looks like they supply them with Warner Brothers information, things like that. So probably the rights to be able to make Superman, Batman figures, Justice League figures, all that intellectual property and copyright that is related to that kind of stuff. So that's one way to look at the supplier and buyer and customer relationships that are available for your companies. So we've looked at buyers and supplier information. We look at company financials. We've looked at lists of competitors. Now we're probably going to look and see what experts are saying about our company. To do that, we want to look at stock reports or equity reports. In this case, Mergent calls them equity reports. And they are found on the report section. And if you go under equity reports here, you'll see that there are equity reports for Mattel and some of the competitors of Mattel. If we click on the PDF here, it'll give us typical buy, sell, hold information in an Adobe PDF format. So here we have whether the company is worth buying, selling, or you want to hold your money. If you're going to invest in that company, it'll also compare how the company or the equity or stock is doing against some of the competitors in that same industry, some of the peers. Likewise, you'll see some financial information in addition to some textual analysis that may talk about some of the company's strategy, things like that, what's going on in the company. So that's one place to get some expert depending on what your company is doing, how it's performing in the industry, and that sort of thing. Another place to look for that is if we go back to the main search menu, we're going to look for the Invest-Tech Snapshot tab over here. This kind of takes us to another module inside Mergent. And if we go in and type in Mattel, here's Mattel Incorporated. This will bring up the three most recent available stock reports or equity reports that are available in Mergent for that company. And so here we have one for Piper Jaffray, we've got Oppenheimer, we've got Keybank, and so we have three stock reports. So we get three other opinions on how that company is doing. They're all going to be in kind of a different format, but definitely worth looking at to kind of give you more judges of your company. You don't want to take one person's word for it. You want to look at different sources to see if they all agree. They give, looks like Mattel, a neutral rating. Looks like I think Ford or Mergent gave it a whole rating. So basically the kind of the same thing. You'll see this does offer a little more textual analysis, a little more understanding of the company's strategy, perhaps, than the other reports. So it's kind of worthwhile to look at multiple ones to get a very good picture of how your experts, your analysts, your stockbrokers, all those kind of people are looking at your company and seeing how they are ranked up or how they're doing compared to some of the peers. Hopefully this video gives you a good understanding about the basics of using Mergent Online. Should you need more help, look for the contact link on the business blog. Glad to help you anyway. And take care and good luck with your research.