How to Research UK Company Data

The library has a couple of databases that specialise in providing information on UK companies both public and private - FAME and KeyNote.

FAME,  from Bureau van Dijk, provides financials for all UK and Irish registered companies from their accounts filed with companies house. It covers public (quoted) and private companies: over 2.8 million active companies and 4.2 inactive companies on 05 June 2012. FAME  provides: registered office, website, phone number, size, main activity, key financials (up to 10 years), directors, current subsidiaries, and current shareholders (including controlling shareholders and GUO (Global Ultimate Owner)).

FAME retail search – click to enlarge

FAME  supports searching for companies by a wide set of criteria including name, location, industry, ownership structure, financials, and when the information has been updated. [Note: for small companies very limited information is available because they only have to report limited information with companies house.]

For more details on using FAME see the Library guides (look for FAME in Database guides section) and the online video guides [Home - Help - Quick tour].

• FAME tagged FAQ answers

KeyNote is best know as a UK market research database providing reports on a wide range of industrial and consumer based products. However KeyNote company information can be used to research and analyse companies and people. It covers more than 7 million UK companies.

Keynote Company Information – List Builder tab (click to expand)

KeyNote company information provides:

• Company search by name (or company number)
• People search for company directors and shareholders
• List builder – select from key search criteria to create a list of companies, add additional output fields if required, and export your spreasheet of results

KeyNote also produces Business Ratio Reports and a UKplc report, based on 22 industry sectors and 141 industries.

KeyNote does not offer the flexibility of FAME  when it comes to search criteria and defining your own output format, but its simpler interface is easy to use and it does offer UK company and market research information in a single database.

Public/Quoted UK companies

If you are only researching public UK companies then you may want to consider other databases that cover public companies worldwide, e.g. Bloomberg, Datastream, Thomson Research, Thomson One Banker. See previous post on Company Financial Analysis.

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