Dirt Diggers Digest Guide to Strategic Corporate Research
By Philip Mattera
Director of the Corporate Research Project and Publisher of the Dirt Diggers Digest
PART II. EXPLORING A COMPANY’S ESSENTIAL RELATIONSHIPS
Companies are like people: they need relationships to survive. These include, for example, relationships with those who buy the firm’s products, those who invest in the company and those who lend it money. When you are involved in a corporate campaign against a company, chances are that you will end up intervening in these relationships in some way, since this is often the most effective way to get a corporation’s attention and persuade it to abandon socially irresponsible policies.
A. PARENT COMPANIES AND SUBSIDIARIES
If you are researching a large company, there is a good chance that it has subsidiaries or is itself a subsidiary of a larger corporation. This is vital information for any campaign.
An indication of where a particular company fits into a corporate hierarchy may be obtained from sources such as Dun & Bradstreet. Public companies must provide a list of subsidiaries in Exhibit 21 of their 10-K.
The most complete data on corporate family trees can be found in a subscription database called Corporate Affiliations, which is published by Lexis-Nexis and is available via larger libraries.
Outside directors (those who are not are not members of management) are supposed to serve as watchdogs, protecting the interests of shareholders against transgressions by executives of the company. As various corporate scandals have shown, outside directors often look the other way or are oblivious to accounting and other forms of fraud. Nevertheless, board members are ultimately responsible for the actions and policies of a company, so it is perfectly legitimate to put pressure on them when a company is trying to bust a union or otherwise act in a socially irresponsible manner.
As noted above, a publicly traded company’s proxy statement is the best source of information about directors, including their stock ownership, their compensation for serving on the board, and their other affiliations. Proxy statements are not always complete when it comes to listing other affiliations (especially when they involve privately held companies or non-profits), so it is worth the effort to check other sources.
To search for references to individuals across all SEC filings, use the full-text search feature of Edgar. The D&B libraries on Nexis and Westlaw have a file called Executive Affiliations that allows you to search for an individual’s affiliations with public and private companies.
Very wealthy directors may be found on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans and the magazine's lists of the World's Billionaires.
If the director you are researching is a well-connected member of the power elite, also try plugging his or her name into a collaborative search engine called LittleSis. Its entries track social networks involving executives, directors, lobbyists and financiers. Other sources on individuals include subscription services such as Relationship Science, BoardEx, and the People Intelligence feature of S&P's Capital IQ.
Most big publicly traded companies are not controlled by individuals or families. Instead, the largest portion of their stock is held by entities known as institutional shareholders. They include pension funds, university endowments, and various categories of investment managers. These institutions wield enormous power in the stock market, so it is standard procedure to engage these investors in corporate campaigns. Sometimes the institutions can be allies, especially Taft-Hartley pension funds (those in which unions play a role in managing) or public employee pension funds (which are often susceptible to political influence). Many of these funds, as well as giants such as TIAA-CREF (the pension fund for many academics and employees of non-profits), may be sympathetic to campaigns that raise some issues of social or environmental accountability.
Dealing with institutional investors is a complicated process that you should not undertake without consulting shareholder activism specialists at groups such as the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility or As You Sow.
Before engaging institutional investors, you need to know which ones have significant holdings in your target company. You can get a free list of the top ten on Yahoo Finance (enter the stock symbol, hit enter, then click on Holders). Owners of 5 percent or more of the shares outstanding must be identified in a company's proxy statement filed with the SEC (see above).
To get the most complete data, you need to subscribe to a commercial service such as Vickers Stock Research, which provides a complete list of institutional holders plus an indication of whether the institution has voting authority for all or some of the shares.
Borrowing money is one of the ways in which companies obtain the funds needed to build new facilities or buy other companies. Corporations may borrow from a single lender, from a group of lenders that form a syndicate to provide a large loan, or by issuing bonds or other debt securities. Corporate campaigns often focus on the role of major creditors, making an issue, for example, of the fact that a bank is lending money to a union-busting employer. The bank then becomes a secondary target of the campaign.
Publicly traded companies, which must disclose the size of their debt, often (but not always) reveal which banks they are borrowing from. In many cases this is disclosed only by including a copy of the credit agreement in the exhibits to the company’s 10-K filing. Dun & Bradstreet often includes the name of a company’s primary bank in its information products. Bank lending to large companies is tracked in databases such as LoanConnector.
Bondholder information is harder to come by than institutional shareholder data. The best sources are Bloomberg Professional (aka Bloomberg Terminal) and Thomson Reuters' eMAXX database.
E. CUSTOMERS, SUPPLIERS, AND FRANCHISEES
Companies are usually quite resistant to disclosing the names of their largest customers or suppliers. Publicly traded corporations must reveal this information in their 10-K filing only if the company is heavily dependent on a small number of customers or suppliers, since that is a significant risk factor that investors need to know about. However, smaller companies may list the larger firms they do business with to impress investors.
For this reason, useful information about your target company’s customers or suppliers may not come from the company’s own SEC filings but rather from those of other public companies it deals with. You would find this out by doing a full-text search of the entire EDGAR database (see above) for references to your target company.
Another approach is to take advantage of the fact that many companies will brag about their dealings with large companies on their websites and will often provide links to their major customers’ sites.
If you want to know which companies supply a particular product, the best source is ThomasNet, the web successor to the Thomas Register printed reference work.
Government Contracts
Among a company’s customers, perhaps the more significant are government agencies, since a corporate campaign can demand that an anti-union or socially irresponsible firm not enjoy the privilege of doing business with the public sector.
Some states put contract information online through the websites of their procurement agencies. The website of the National Association of State Procurement Officers has a map with links to these agencies. Detailed information on federal contract awards can be found on the USA Spending website.
Brand Names and Trademarks
Public companies usually mention their leading brands in the portion of the 10-K that describes the firm’s operations. For a comprehensive list of brand names and the companies that own them, consult Brands and Their Companies which is part of the Gale Directory Library available through many library systems.
Information on company trademarks (as well as patents) can be found at the website of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Market Shares and Market Research
Gale publishes an annual volume called Market Share Reporter that collects data from trade journals and other sources on the rankings of the top companies in a large number of business sectors. It is available via the Gale Directory Library. Also see the market research reports contained in databases such as MarketResearch.com and IBISWorld Industry Market Research available via some university library systems. ReportLinker is a pay service that provides access to reports from a variety of sources.
Exports and Imports
The leading sources of data on international shipment of goods are the subscription services PIERS (Port Import/Export Reporting Services), Import Genius and Panjiva. The latter provides profiles of global suppliers, including data on their shipments.
Franchisees
Large companies in industries such as restaurants, lodging and retail earn revenue by franchising their trademarks and/or business methods. Franchisors are required to provide potential franchisees with a disclosure document, the contents of which are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. Copies of these documents, which include details on the franchisor, can be obtained from pay services such as FRANdata. A few states such as Minnesota post franchise disclosure documents online. The FRANdata Franchisee Database is available on Nexis.
Updated June 7, 2025
Jump to Part I. GETTING STARTED: THE KEY SOURCES OF COMPANY INFORMATION
Jump to Part III. ANALYZING A COMPANY’S ACCOUNTABILITY RECORD