Company Websites and Investor Information
Company websites can be a wealth of information about your company. It can tell you how they see themselves and how they organize their business.
Public companies are required to provide regular information and updates to their shareholders. Today, many of your large companies keep this information on their company websites. This can be a great place to see how the company is presenting their information to shareholders, including marketing strategies, campaigns, financial information, and more.
How to Locate Investor Information
Every website differs, so the information may be different for every company. Look around the website, particularly in the small print in the footer or bottom of the page. Look for anything that talks about "legal," the company itself, shareholders or investors.
Below is an example of searching a company website for this type of information.
Be Mindful of Bias
When using information from the company's website, be sure to keep in mind that the authors will be inherently biased towards their company, so their perspective may be skewed. It doesn't mean that the information isn't trustworthy - just that you want to take into account the viewpoint of the author when using it.
Example: Searching the Coca-Cola company website
1) Locate your company's website
Start by Googling or searching the internet for your company. Usually the main company website will appear near the top of your search results.
TIP: If you've already located your company's profile in Gale Business Insights, the website is often listed in the company information.
2) Check the footer, or the fine print at the bottom of the website
Look for anything that says "investor," "company information," "legal," "shareholders," etc.
In this example, the footer includes a section labeled "legal," and includes a link that says "Company" that looks promising.
3) Look around at how the company presents itself.
The Company link took me to a separate site that gives a lot of pretty information about marketing and campaigns, including a section on the company purpose. This can be a good way to see how the company views itself or how it wants to be seen by the public.
4) Look for Investor Information
Explore the website looking for "Investor" information. In this example, Coca-Cola's "Company" link includes an overview of the company itself. To the top right, there's a link for "Investors" where we'll likely find more information about the business itself.
5) Explore the resources available
In this example, Coca-Cola provides a lot of different information: Strategies, SEC Filings, Financial Information, Stock Info, and News articles.
There's even links to transcripts and recordings of shareholder meetings.
All of this helps to show how the business is organized and operates, how it views itself, and how it presents itself to its shareholders.