Corporate Annual Reports and Financial Statements

The SEC requires all public companies (except foreign companies and companies with less than $10 million in assets and 500 shareholders) to file registration statements, periodic reports, and other forms electronically through this site (formerly called EDGAR). Anyone can access and download this information for free. Here you'll find links to a complete list of filings available from the SEC and instructions for searching the SEC database.

--You can check the Web site for the company to see if any company history is available on the Web. The usual form of a company's Web site is http://www.companyname.com -- but sometimes there are differences in the address. You can almost always find sites for publicly traded corporations by using Google.

Documents covering public corporations in over 100 countries. MergentWeb contains all the historical information recorded in Moody's Manuals dating back to the early 1900s. This archive is an excellent source of corporate history, business descriptions and financial statements.

The SEC requires all public companies (except foreign companies and companies with less than $10 million in assets and 500 shareholders) to file registration statements, periodic reports, and other forms electronically through this site (formerly called EDGAR). Anyone can access and download this information for free. Here you'll find links to a complete list of filings available from the SEC and instructions for searching the SEC database.

North America
Compustat North America is a database of U.S. and Canadian fundamental and market information on active and inactive publicly held companies. It provides more than 300 annual and 100 quarterly Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows, and supplemental data items. Compustat North America files are available in both annual and quarterly formats. The industrial annual formats offer both historical and restated data. The industrial quarterly formats offer restated data as reported by the company. The restated data allows analysts to compare current and prior years' results on a comparable basis and determine financial trends and growth rates. For most companies, annual history is available back to 1950 and quarterly history back to 1962 with monthly market history back to 1962.
Compustat North America files also contain information on aggregates, industry segments, banks, market prices, dividends, and earnings. For more detailed information on the Compustat files, consult the Compustat User's Guide.

Global
Compustat Global is a database of non-U.S. and non-Canadian fundamental and market information on more than 33,900 active and inactive publicly held companies with annual data history from 1987. Compustat Global is a database of non-U.S.data is unique in that it is normalized to provide comparability across a wide variety of global accounting standards and practices. Accounting standards vary considerably among countries, making accurate comparisons of as-reported data somewhat difficult. Rather than adopt one country's set of accounting principles as the standard for collecting data from all countries, we have created consistent sets of financial data items for the Global database by examining financial statements from a variety of countries and identifying items that are widely reported by companies, regardless of their geographic location, business activity or accounting practices. Within these uniform data sets, we normalize the data to local accounting principles, disclosure methods and data item definitions. As a result, you can make more meaningful comparisons among industries and countries.

Get a quick overview of large companies, their operations, and competitors.