 Hey there, Chad Boninger here for High University Libraries. This video is admittedly one of the longest videos I've made. It's designed to give the beginning business researcher a good overview of where to find company information. It's going to cover where to find basic company information, where to find articles about a company, where to find legal issues about a company, where to find a SWOT analysis for your company, all those different kinds of things. Where to find analyst reports or equity reports or stock reports for your company. It goes through about four or five different resources, so it's worth looking at. And it's designed for those classes who I may not get to meet with, who are basically doing a good overview of a company, looking for things like what the company's doing, some of its competitors, they need to understand the company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, all those kinds of things. This video kind of walks you through the various resources that you'll use in doing that type of company research. So here you go. So when you're doing company research and you know nothing about a company or you just need a good place to start, Hoover's is a great place for that. And I'm going to show you why. We're going to go here and we're going to search for Walmart, which is the name of my company I'm going to deal with today. And we'll just do Walmart and do search. You can see it brings up quite a few different Walmart's. Eventually you'll find the right one. We want the one that is the headquarters and I happen to know Walmart is a public company. The New York Stock Exchange ticker there. So that's the company I want. Now this takes us to the Walmart stores incorporated homepage and notice how it's spelled here. I didn't spell it that way. I spelled W-A-L-M-A-R-T. You want to make sure you get that dash and some other databases there. If you notice there's some punctuation issues. So this is a great place to start if you know nothing about a company. Here on the homepage we get a company description. You can click more for information there. This is actually pretty good because you click the full, read the full description here and it gives you some information about the company, some operations and also some information about the company's strategy, which is pretty interesting to look at there. If you want a good company history back on the homepage here you can click on read company history. All these links here are also available under these various headings up here. So here's our company history. This will be a good place to give you a perhaps a better history than what you'll find on the company website. Sometimes the company website can be a little bit biased and won't necessarily tell the whole story. In this case hopefully Hoover's will unfold a little bit more of the story than what's uncovered on the Walmart website. This is a great place to find company financials here. And I'll just look at the financial summary. As an example here is kind of the financial snapshot page here. You can kind of see how Walmart's doing against the company versus the industry versus the market as a whole. Things like that. And if you'd like you can see that there is a news page about the company. And this will link you to news stories around the internet about what's going on with the company. So this is one way to kind of find information about Walmart. And they've even incorporated some social media here with Twitter. Things like that as well as a weekly or monthly event timeline here pertaining to what's going on with Walmart in the news. If you want to analyze Walmart versus the competition there is a nice competitors list or competitive landscape. The competitive landscape will actually benchmark Walmart against three other companies that Hoover's chooses to be in that particular industry. So here we have Walmart against Target versus Costco versus Carrefour. So all these are major kind of supermarket and general retailer establishments, big box stores if you will. Okay, you can also go up and look at the competitors list. And this is a way that you can actually see all these different competitors that Hoover's kind of puts in the same industry. And what's nice about this you can go in and actually choose different companies to compare Walmart to up to three. Okay, so we'll do that and we'll click compare competitors. And so this gives us a nice list, kind of a customized list. Customized list of companies to look at when we're comparing Walmart. Now here's what's interesting here about this comparison. You see Walmart's making a whole lot of money on annual sales. But their profit margin is actually lower than Dollar General, which is kind of interesting there. So pretty interesting comparison there. Okay, so good way to get information to compare the different companies and things like that. So if you want to know where Walmart operates, here's a products and operations. In this case, it'll tell you in which areas of the world Walmart operates. In addition to this, it'll also tell you the percentage of sales from there, or how many stores they have. And then the percentage of sales by each, looks like by each establishment that Walmart owns or each small Walmart company. As well as the product lines that Walmart sells in their various stores. So here we see most of their sales over half are coming from grocery. And then we get into things like entertainment and health and wellness. And then other goods like that. So a good way to see how Walmart makes their money. Again, this is Hoover's a great place to look for company information, especially if you're limited on time or you've never done really in-depth business research or you just need to get started looking at a particular company. This is a great resource for that. The second place we'll look is a database called Lexus Nexus. There's a couple different ways to use this. One way, if you just want to just type in the search box here, we'll just type in Walmart. Lexus Nexus is primarily known as a newspaper database. And so if we search for Walmart, here it brings up all kinds of information. We just want to click on newspapers to limit our results down. So here we have stuff from the New York Times, stuff from the Santa Fe, New Mexican, International Herald Tribune. And this will give us information about Walmart and some of the world newspapers and things like that. So a great way to kind of get news information about your company. A quick way to kind of get information from basically newspapers from around the globe. So it's a great way to find that kind of information. Another way to use this is there's a get company info section here. So if you want to, you can go down and let's just type in Walmart here and do go there. This is going to take us, once we find our company here, is going to take us into a place that looks very similar or has similar information than what you found in Hoover's. I previously talked about in this video. And a lot of the information is actually going to be very, very similar because it's all kind of financial kind of information and things like that. So if you want to, you can use this instead of Hoover's because the financial information should be identical because it all comes from official SEC filings from the Securities and Exchange Commission. So it's all based upon their 10K and 10 key reports and things like that. You might see if you go to things like competitors. They may give you a slightly different list of competitors, things like that. You can click on some of these competitors and go to those companies here inside of Lexus Nexus. They also have a news section within here that might be worth looking at. Cuz this will give you current news about your company, right? So here we have information from your current news about your company. And if you want to, you can see there's also major newspapers. Or if you want to see how Walmart is being talked about in a particular aspect of the world, you can change two different newspapers in that area. So a good way to kind of find news on your company as well. One other thing you can look at here is that there is a recent cases information in here. So if you want to see recent US cases of which Walmart has been involved in. And so here we see different cases of which Walmart is a plaintiff or a defendant in a lawsuit or things like that. So a great way to find information about what sort of legal battles Walmart is currently involved in. So again, this is Lexus Nexus, lots of different ways to use this. These are just a few ways to use it if you're just doing basic company research. The last database we'll show you is a database called Business Source Complete. And in this database, this is a good place to also find articles about your company. So if we go in and type in Walmart. Now this is kind of funny. If you do Walmart here, you'll notice I get some search terms. But if I search wall dash mark, here we have Walmart stores incorporated the actual name of the company. So sometimes punctuation will matter a little bit. So be careful about that. You may have to try different searches to see what happens. Now this brings up 17,000 results here in Business Source Complete. If you want, you can go limit to two newspapers, right? And find newspaper articles. Now what you'll probably find is the majority of the newspaper articles in here come from the Wall Street Journal. Okay, so that's one of the reasons why you might want to check out Lexus Nexus, the database right before I started talking about this one. Because it's more than just a Wall Street Journal. So if you want more information from other places, this may not be the best place for that. However, it's a great place for magazine articles. So we go limit to magazines over here on the left-hand side. Here we have articles from like Money Magazine, from Fortune Magazine, things like that. Now if you want to, you can go over here and change the limiter. So we get stuff from maybe the past two years. And so we're now down to 753 instead of over 4,000. And so we have stuff from Money Magazine, Business Week, Forbes, different places like that, okay? Businessweek.com, all kinds of unfortunate things like that. So a great way to kind of find magazine articles about your company. This is also a great place, and we'll get rid of the magazine limiter here. Actually, I'll tell you what, let me just do a new search here. I'm going to go ahead and search for Walmart again. And we're going to get the same number of search results here. This is also a great place to look for SWOT analysis, an analysis of your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And to find those, all you got to do is search for your company, get a list of results, and then go down here and click Show More. And if there's a SWOT analysis available for your company, there'll be a checkbox here. So just click Check, do Update. And here we have our Walmart store SWOT analysis. It looks like these come out about every year to six months or so. The last one looks like it was from August of 2014. You need a full text over here on the left-hand side. And so this will load the company profile for Walmart stores incorporated from a company called Marketline, puts this together. And you can see on page four, let's scroll past the key facts here, it gives you the SWOT analysis. So basically it tells you what the company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are, okay? Now this is a great place to get started with research in your company. Don't necessarily take all this information and declare it to be totally true and then say you're done with your research. You want to build upon the information that you find in here. Okay, so if we see, for example, here is stuff about internationalization, right? We say, oh, that's one of their strengths. We might want to go back into business source complete or even back into LexisNexis and search for Walmart and internationalization to see if we get additional articles about that topic to build upon the SWOT analysis found in here. Okay, so it's a great way to kind of find information on your company and great place to find basic information for your company. Just build upon it with additional information that you find. So I know I said that business source complete was the last one I wanted to show you, but I want to give you a bonus. This is a merchant online and this is a little more advanced than what you'll find in Hoover's or even in LexisNexis. But the power users out there may appreciate, we'll just do a search for Walmart here, may appreciate using this instead of LexisNexis or Hoover's. You can see there's all kinds of stuff for company financials. There's informational competitors. There's a news section here, things like that. So very similar overlap to what you might find in Hoover's. But a lot of information can be downloaded. You can manipulate the data a little bit easier here in Mergent. I do want to kind of highlight one thing in here under the reports. This is a place where you can go and get what's called an equity report. And this will give you a, basically it's a stock report that basically tells you if the company's worth investing in right now or not. And so you can see there's also competitive reports for Walmart here. And just clicking the PDF here will open our PDF here. Once it downloads, we'll have our report that basically will tell us if the company is a buy, sell, or a hold. So in this case, Ford Equity Research, a product of Mergent, is telling us that to hold on either buying or selling Walmart stock, okay? So if we already own it, don't sell it yet. If we don't own it, don't buy it yet. And it'll give you some of the rationale in this three page snapshot. You can see that the only one they're recommending to buy is actually big lots, and it will tell you some of the financial information and things like that base that decision. So a great place to look for a stock report or an equity report for your company and its competitors. While we're in here under the reports tab, there's this Mergent Reports feature, which actually allows you to do like predefined reports. So if you just want a quick fact sheet on your company, you can do that, and it'll give you a nice little preview over here on the right hand side to tell you a little bit about your company. Or if you want a fact sheet express, things like that. So these are all kinds of information that you can download from Mergent to get a nice snapshot or a very in-depth report, depending on your needs here from Mergent online. Hope this video helped you better understand how to get started in company research. Should you need more help, look for the contact link on the business blog and be glad to help you any way I can. Take care and have a great day.