Finding Competitor Companies
Fall 2015
Librarian: Gary Klein
E-mail: gklein@willamette.edu
Library web pages for AGSM
http://libguides.willamette.edu/agsm
http://libguides.willamette.edu/competitor-companies
http://library.willamette.edu/extras/classes/agsm/finding-competitors.doc
2 LIBRARY BASED ONLINE RESOURCES (requires WU login)
HOOVER’S - Online Business Network
In addition to using this database to obtain snapshot sized profiles of individual companies, Hoovers Online
offers the ability to determine a handful of major competitors in the same industry. This continually updated database
offers basic services free to anyone. A number of features are only accessible if you purchase your personal subscription
to Hoovers. The information obtained from the free side of this database should open doors for further research that you
can then perform on other resources.
Start out by telling Hoovers that you are looking for a Company. Large corporations will often have multiple
entries for various divisions & similarly named operating units. Some companies formally include “THE” as part of their
name, which happens to be the case with the parent company of Fred Meyer Stores, “The Kroger Company”. There are
several ways of searching for a company, including Stock Trading Symbols. Publicly traded firms will have substantially
more information available. You should use the tab called “Products & Operations” to make sure that a company you
select has the products, services and brand names that you are relevant to your needs.
There are 6 options to explore under the tab called “Financials”. When you request Historical Financials,
you will get up to 10 years for a handful of data elements, as well as 9 items from the latest year-end financials. If you
click on Income Statement you can get as many as 19 data elements that can go back either 5 years, or 5 quarters.
Likewise, the Balance Sheet option and the Cash Flow option can each go back either 5 years, or 5 quarters.
You can also find additional data & ratios under the tab called “Financial Market Data”.
MERGENT ONLINE
Provides full-text access to a variety of company specific resources, current & historical summaries, SEC
documents, competitive analyses, and financial ratios produced by Mergent Online for stock market oriented investment
decision making. Some industrial data is available, but is primarily text oriented industry analyses. Mergent Online
works best when you know either the name or the stock ticker symbol of a publicly traded corporation, from which point
you can cross over into other analytical resources.
Significant clusters of information are available from a few key tabs that are present for all publicly traded
companies: Company details; Company financials; Reports; and Competitors.
Underneath the Company Financial tab, you will find historical information available either annually or
quarterly, as far back as 15 years. Please note that when you ask Mergent Online for quarterly data, there is a difference
between the “As Reported” version and the “Standardized” version! “As Reported” will only show the First, Second and
Third quarters in the “Quarterly mode”. If you want to see the Fourth Quarter results through the “As Reported” lens,
then you will need to choose the Annual option. But if you want to view the reports through the “Standardized” lens,
then you will automatically see all 4 quarters of each year, lined up in perfect sequence. When looking for historical
financial data, there are 5 options to choose from: Balance sheet; Income statement; Retained earnings; Cash
flow, and also All sections. Mergent Online also offers options with respect to Footnotes, as well as the scale of
rounding.
Many of the resource segments offer pre-formatted output options. At any time, you can click on the Report
Builder tab, and custom build a report with the data elements of your choice. Output options typically include: HTML;
Word documents; Excel spreadsheets or PDF documents.
1 ONLINE RESOURCE FOF COMPETITORS & FINANCIAL COMPARISONS (free to anyone)
YAHOO FINANCE – Free online service
This advertising supported series of web services is primarily designed for the “do it yourself investor.”
Yahoo Finance offers a decent array of quick navigational links between almost any publicly traded company,
its competitors, and some basic industry specific information.
Many of Yahoo’s advertisers incorporate various types of popup windows, moving images and
interactive devices that try to track who uses this service, it can cause problems with some browsers. Google’s
Chrome browser seems to work problem free when viewing this website.
When you request Annual income statements, the most you will get from Yahoo is just 3 years, while
the Quarterly data maxes out at 4 quarters.
Starting point for this use of Yahoo Finance:: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=wfm
Finding Competitor Companies
Fall 2015
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Gary Klein
Hatfield Library
From the light blue panel on the left side, click on the link for Competitors and you will get the following table:
Make note that at this stage, you only see a handful of competitor’s ticker symbols & names. Note that one of
the competitors is privately held. Now, go to the left column called, look for “Industry” and click on that link.
This new page will spell out which Sector and Industry these stock analysts have placed Whole Foods, as well
as the performance of the stock & industry on the last reported trading session:
Slightly below that section is a table showing “Top Grocery Stores Companies by Market Cap”:
Finding Competitor Companies
Fall 2015
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Gary Klein
Hatfield Library
Followed immediately by a second table comparing WFM with “Industry Leaders”:
The first table compares Whole Foods with 5 of its competitors. The second table compares Whole Foods
against its industry leading competitors, in 9 selected metrics.
If you click on the blue colored link called “View Leader & Laggards” you will then be able to see the top 10
leaders, and the bottom 10 laggards. You can then choose from 15 different metrics that have been precomputed by Yahoo, to display the Leaders and Laggards for each metric. Metrics that relate to Stock Prices
are updated daily.
Finding Competitor Companies
Fall 2015
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Gary Klein
Hatfield Library
You can view all of the company names that Yahoo Finance considers to be competitors of Whole Foods by
going to the far left column, and clicking on the link called “Company Index”:
In the case of Whole Foods, YAHOO is suggesting that there are 18 publicly traded companies that compete
with Whole Foods for the industry that they call “Grocery Stores”:
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Fall 2015
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Gary Klein
Hatfield Library
Alon Holdings Blue Square - Israel Ltd. [BSI]
Arden Group, Inc. [ARDNA]
Casey's General Stores, Inc. [CASY]
Companhia Brasileira de Distribuição [CBD]
Core-Mark Holding Company, Inc. [CORE]
Etablissements Delhaize Frères et Cie "Le Lion"
S.A. [DEG]
Ingles Markets, Incorporated [IMKTA]
QKL Stores Inc. [QKLS]
Ruddick Corporation [RDK]
Safeway Inc. [SWY]
SUPERVALU INC. [SVU]
Susser Holdings Corporation [SUSS]
The Fresh Market, Inc. [TFM]
The Kroger Co. [KR]
The Pantry, Inc. [PTRY]
Village Super Market, Inc. [VLGEA]
Weis Markets, Inc. [WMK]
Whole Foods Market, Inc. [WFM]
Winn-Dixie Stores, Inc. [WINN]
If you explore each of these companies, then you might understand why there is no such thing as a list of
publicly traded competitors that will make everyone happy, in terms of peer comparisons for Whole Foods!
However, you can rejoice over the fact that you now have a good authoritative listing of publicly traded
competitors, within a specific industry. And you also have a standard set of clickable links that will allow you
to get comparable data for those firms
Go through the listing and one at time, click on a company’s name and you will get Yahoo’s Summary of
that company, in a standard format, much like what we originally viewed when we started searching for Whole
Foods. You can then view Yahoo Finance’s Profile of that company. Each profile tries to display each
corporation’s mailing address, phone number, website, business summary, and its top five executives.
Whenever you are looking at Yahoo Finance’s information for just a single company, you will always have the
same variety of clickable options on the left side of the screen inside the light blue column.
Near the bottom of that left side column, you will find links for Income Statement and for Balance
Sheet.
Each of those pages is also switchable between Annual data or Quarterly date. All of Yahoo’s financial
options is based on each particular company’s Fiscal Year.
Finding Competitor Companies
Fall 2015
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Gary Klein
Hatfield Library