Comparison: Mergent Online and Orbis - a comparative examination of two business resources

Introduction

Mergent Online and Orbis are two popular business databases that are commonly used to find company and industry information. Mergent Online is headquartered in the USA and Orbis is in Brussels, Belgium. Each of these databases has a strong listing of US companies and industries, but the global market of virtually all business interests now requires a knowledge of international competition, local business opportunities, exchange rates, logistics, and many other types of information.

Other databases such as Hoover's and the S&P NetAdvantage were considered but not included due to access restrictions or weak private business holdings. Numerous other business databases, both free and subscription, such as Dun & Bradstreet (RR 2003/67), Onesource.com, Value Line, Yahoo Finance, and many others have strong holdings in a particular type of business information such as financial data, annual reports, location, ratios, etc., but do not have the comprehensive coverage of these two databases. Comprehensive, timely and accurate information is essential in any business venture, whether local or overseas, and these two databases do an excellent job in providing it.

Mergent Online

(www.mergentonline.com)

The Mergent Online database is owned by Mergent, Inc., a company established in 1900 and originally known as Moody's. Over the years it was bought and sold by a number of companies, and in 2008 the present owner, Carousel Capital, a private equity fund, purchased the company. Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Mergent provides global financial information on both private and publicly traded companies. Though based in the USA, it has offices in London, Tokyo and Melbourne. Mergent states that there are 20,000 + non-US companies in 100 + countries listed in their database, and they have an extensive historical database dating back to the early twentieth century. Mergent provides numerous print and online products, but their best-known resource is the Mergent Online database.

According to the site's opening page, Mergent Online has six areas of company data:

1 US company data, which includes 10,000 + public companies with SEC filings.

2 Global private companies, which has 400,000 + national and international private companies.

3 International company data.

4 Current and past US annual reports in PDF format.

5 International annual reports in PDF format.

6 Expanded coverage of corporations similar in coverage to the historic...