LibGuides: Company and Industry Research: Private Companies

Articles and News

Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Search for articles on management, finance, economics, industry, accounting, and international business from popular business magazines, scholarly journals, and trade publications. Includes Political Risk Yearbooks.
Political Risk Yearbooks provide probability forecasts for political, social and economic trends for 100 countries, and are included in Business Source Complete since 2003. In the "Publication" field in the Advanced Search, search for Political Risk Yearbook and the name of the country.
ABI/INFORM Collection This link opens in a new window
Search for journal articles, trade journals and market research reports with business and economic information
Factiva This link opens in a new window
Search for global news and information content, including Dow Jones, Reuters Newswires, and The Wall Street Journal. Text & data mining prohibited by license. See the "more" link for details.
Text and data mining (TDM) of Factiva content is prohibited by license. TDM includes mass downloading of content via scripts (aka scraping) *and* via Factiva's internal tools for downloading content. Please use ProQuest's TDM Studio for text mining.
Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Sources include newspapers, scholarly journals, news wire services, newsletters, company reports,trade publications, broadcast transcripts, and selected reference works.

Proquest Asian Business Collection
Covers Asian business and financial information from key international publications including Far Eastern Economic Review, Asiaweek, and many more.

Hard to find private companies

National Secretary of State Site
All 50 states make some level of private business incorporation information available online. Can range from limited information such as name availability to a wider range of private company business records.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an online social networking site for professionals and may provide access to private company information such as size, key company employees, and new hires.
Patent and Trademark Office
Patents and trademarks are often one of the few public records available for new private companies involved in science and technology fields.
Fedspending.org
FedSpending.org provides information on government grants and contracts, including those secured by private firms.
VentureBeatProfiles
A platform to discover, research, and share information and opinions about internet startup companies, including company profiles with management and board of directors information, products and/or services produced, funding information, and competitors.

Private Company Info and Directories

Privco (Private Company Financial Intelligence) This link opens in a new window
Search for business and financial data on major, non-publicly traded corporations, including family owned, private equity owned, venture backed, and international unlisted companies. Note: Sign up for an account using your Duke email address.
Mergent Online This link opens in a new window
Includes "Mergent Private Company Search" tab and "D&B Private Company Database" under Basic Search.
Please use the LSEG Workspace AMR add-on to access investment bank company and industry reports.

Archival data includes full business descriptions, histories and financial statements for more than 12,000 US companies that were acquired, went bankrupt, liquidated or merged out of existence from 1996 onward. International Company Data - covers over 27,000 non-U.S. active and inactive companies. Archival data includes financial information on 12,000 non-U.S. companies that were acquired, went bankrupt, liquidated or merged from 1995 onward. Duke's subscribed modules include: U.S. Company data, International Company data, D&B Private Company data, Global Industry Reports, and Investext Snapshot analyst reports.
ORBIS This link opens in a new window
Search financial, ownership, and basic information on over 200 million public & private companies worldwide. ORBIS provides global standard report formats as well as descriptive information, company financials, news, market research, ratings and country reports, scanned reports, ownership and M&A data.
Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Use Companies ... Company Profiles link to search US Private Companies
S&P Global NetAdvantage This link opens in a new window
S&P Global NetAdvantage is a subset of content available within S&P Capital IQ. It includes S&P Industry Surveys, equity & industry research, mutual fund information, executive and director listings, and CFRA Outlook - a weekly stock and industry newsletter.
A database covering a broad spectrum of industry, company and investment analysis including Industry Surveys, and Equity Research (formerly Stock Reports). Industry data sets include key ratios, benchmarks, constituents, financial metrics, etc. by sub-industry or geography (see Markets tab). Archived Industry Surveys included as far back as 1999 depending upon title continuity. Company data covers a global universe of over 3 million private and public companies.
Data Axle This link opens in a new window
This directory allows you to search private business listings by company name, yellow page headings, NAICS and SIC codes, executive names, sales volume and number of employees.
TECH NOTE: if you experience "redirect" or "Invalid URL Path" errors, and are off-campus, enable a Library Resources VPN connection and browse directly to: https://www.referenceusa.com/. On campus users may browse directly to https://www.referenceusa.com/
SimplyAnalytics This link opens in a new window
Includes a detailed business directory component where you can search by geographic area and NAICS or SIC codes. Also has US Census data and consumer marketing data aggregated or imputed to small geographic areas such as Census Tract or Block Group.
Includes data from the US Census, the American Community Survey (ACS), the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), D&B's Points-of-Interest business directory, and MRI-SimmonsLOCAL consumer behavior dataset.

Private Company Rankings

America's Largest Private Companies from Forbes
The companies on this list are either too few shareholders to be required to file financial statements with the Securities & Exchange Commission or whose shares are restricted to some group, like family members or employees. The list can be searched or ordered by rank, name, state, industry, revenue, or number of employees.
Red Herring's 100 Awards
Compiles a list of the top 100 private technology companies in each of the Global, Americas, Europe, and Asia categories.
Inc. 5000: The Fastest Growing Private Companies in America
The Inc. 5000 is an expansion of the Inc. 500, which was introduced in 1982 and offers a comprehensive look at the 5000 fastest growing private companies in America.
D&B Business Rankings
A print publication (At the Ford Library) that ranks over 25,000 of the United States' leading private and public businesses by size as measured by sales volume and number of employees. Also rankings within each state, within industry categories, and within the private/foreign-owned designation.

Company and Industry Research: Private Companies

Private Companies

Articles and News

Hard to find private companies

Private Company Info and Directories

Private Company Rankings

Contact Us

Services for...