You know how to find information on corporates in your own country, but what do you do when asked to find information on corporations somewhere else in the world? What sites can you trust? What sites are essential? What will help you answer the questions you need to uncover? Although some sites—LinkedIn.com is an example—are global in nature, they'll just tell you about the people who work in corporations. You can search but you won't find anything different to what you'll get for a local search (unless the profile is in another language but Google Translate (or Bing Translate) can figure that out.
Here, without further ado, are the five sites, with a few additional suggestions:
1) Open Corporates bills itself as "The largest open database of companies in the world". There are currently over 200 million companies on the database. It covers almost every country in the world. (Annoyingly, China is missing. You can try GWBMA lnc.’s Chinese company database, Registration China but only if you can enter the target company name in Chinese characters. Alternatively, you can pay for information on several services, such as EMIS, an ISI Emerging Markets Group Company or China Checkup, although I cannot vouch for this or any of its competitors). OpenCorporates gives details on companies, showing which countries have a company with the name you entered and then allowing you to access the local registry.
2) OCCRP ID used to be known as the InvestigativeDashboard.org but now has been combined with its parent—the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Its mission is to support investigators uncover bad actors in the corporate world. To do so, it lists legal and financial databases for all countries—from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
3) Staying on a financial theme, World Stock Exchanges is useful for finding where publicly quoted companies are located. Often their financials are given too. I prefer this site to some others as it seems (at least to me) more complete. For example, it includes both the Chittagong stock exchange and the Dhaka stock exchange—both in Bangladesh. The Chittagong exchange is missed out from some other sites (such as Stock Market MBA, which bases its list on those exchanges having a Bloomberg code).
4) Having explored finances, what about general trading intelligence? This may not give information on corporations but can help put information into context by giving statistics on trading across the world. IndexMundi provides country statistics and data that lets you look at regions, countries, industry sectors and more. For example, commodity prices and trade whether bananas and oranges, oil or gold, silver and other metals, over time and geography. IndexMundi is similar to Knoema that holds a vast database of international data including the top chess players, religious freedom across the world and Bangalore traffic statistics (just in case you need these). Knoema also offers a number of visualisation and graphical options. The only reason I don't put it first is that, although the data is currently free, I suspect you will eventually have to pay for the more premium content, bringing it into line with other statistical data sources such as Statista Statista.com
5) All You Can Read is a database of global online news sources. If you need to know what the press is saying, this site will take you to possible sources, usually in the language of the country. Sadly, it's not complete, as it misses out some regional and specialist news sources. However, in general it's a good first source to check to find out online news sources.
Arthur Weiss (a.weiss@aware.co.uk) is the managing director of AWARE, specialising in marketing intelligence training, analysis and research, He has been a frequent speaker at Internet Librarian International. Arthur is a Chartered Marketer with the UK's Chartered Institute of Marketing and a member of SLA, AIIP and the Association of MBAs.