FreePint Report: Product Review of Factiva Companies & Executives
September 2014 Product Review of Factiva Companies & Executives
In-depth, independent review of the product, plus links to related resources
“...the product’s strong company and executive screening and list-building capabilities makes it popular with those in sales, marketing and business development roles...”
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www.freepint.com © Free Pint Limited 2014 Contents
Introduction & Contact Details 4
Sources - Content and Coverage 5
Technology - Search, Outputs & Alerts, User Interface & Help 13
Value - Competitors, Development & Pricing 18
About the Reviewer 20
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Disclaimer
This reprint was created from FreePint Report: Product Review of Factiva Companies & Executives a report originally published in (ISBN 978-1-78123-171-5) is a FreePint report published by Free Pint Limited. September 2014 and was accurate as of that date. Reprinted with the permission The opinions, advice, products and services offered herein are the sole responsibility of Free Pint Ltd. All other of the contributors. Whilst all reasonable care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of rights reserved. the publication, the publishers cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions. For further information, contact: Caitlin Cricco, Marketing Except as covered by subscriber or purchaser licence agreement, this publication +1-212-416-3457 [email protected], MAY NOT be copied and/or distributed without the prior written agreement of the www.dowjones.com publishers. Product names used in this report are for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners. Free Pint Limited disclaims any and all rights in those marks. All rights reserved.
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Introduction: Company and Product Factiva Companies & Executives is part of the Factiva business information service from well-known global news and business information provider Dow Jones.
The vendor says the product’s strong company and executive screening and list- building capabilities makes it popular with those in sales, marketing and business development roles.
Its integration of company and executive profile information with current and archive news also makes it useful to researchers and analysts in many organisations, such as financial services firms, consultancies and a wide range of information-intensive businesses. By Chris Porter View author biography Contact Details Dow Jones is a global company. Its headquarters are in New York and it has a significant presence in London, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Paris and Hong Kong, plus local sales offices in over 50 countries around the world.
Office locations are listed at http://new.dowjones.com/contact-us-thank/office-locations A contact form is at http://new.dowjones.com/contact-us-thank/salesinquiry-form/ Customer support is accessed via http://new.dowjones.com/contact-us-thank/customer-support/ Dow Jones & Co. 1211 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10036 USA Contact: Brian Gelinas, executive director product management Email: [email protected] Website: www.dowjones.com Twitter: @dowjones
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Source Content Detail: Company Profile and News Content The primary providers of company and executive profile information for Factiva Companies & Executives are FactSet, for information on listed companies worldwide, and D&B, for privately held companies.
Dow Jones has augmented the coverage for some regions through agreements with regional content providers, notably Hoppenstedt, for Germany, and First Independent Rating Agency (FIRA), for Russia.
Some content is also added using proprietary web crawling and fact extraction technology, stemming from the acquisition by Dow Jones of a company called Generate Inc in 2008. Elements added or enriched in this way include company business descriptions, executive profile details and business event “signals”, as described later in this review.
Languages: additionally, the service integrates aggregated Factiva news content from 32,000 news sources in 28 languages, including those in more complex character sets such as Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean.
Sources exclusive to Factiva include: Dow Jones and Reuters newswires; Dow Jones print and online publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and Financial News; newspaper and online content from sister publications belonging to Dow Jones parent company News Corp such as the UK Times and Sunday Times; and many thousands of other licensed and online sources.
Regarding company content, Dow Jones says there are around 20 million companies in total profiled on the service, of which over 46,000 are listed and the remainder privately held.
Sample country coverage totals as found on the service were as follows:
Companies Companies Country Country (approx.) (approx.) United States 10.5 million Brazil 155,000 United Kingdom 2,850,000 Turkey 143,000 Russia 1,174,000 Poland 96,500 Italy 1,275,000 Mexico 79,500 Japan 1,155,000 Indonesia 33,000 China 1,150,000 Malaysia 31,250 Germany 618,000 Singapore 27,700 France 392,000 Argentina 27,300 Australia 380,000 South Africa 22,000 Canada 329,000 Peru 15,000 India 327,000 Iran 12,500 Spain 245,000
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“Company Snapshot” Data Coverage As is the norm with services of this type, the vendor combines information from multiple sources into a single “Company Snapshot” display.
Figure 1: Company Snapshot
The snapshot is headed with general and contact information, plus for quoted companies a chart of recent stock price activity (sourced from Swiss-based information provider SIX Financial).
In scrolling down the Company Snapshot screen, you see further information, including: “Corporate Signals” of recent events (described later) A detailed business description Industry classifications under various schemes including the proprietary Dow Jones Intelligent Indexing A list of key executives with links to their profiles Latest financial highlights, with an attractive graphical display of key historical data.
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Figure 2: Performance charts
To the left of the company snapshot, again as is usual in this type of service, the user sees navigational links to specific types of information including: Recent news Key developments (sourced from Reuters) Officers and executives Peer comparisons (via FactSet) Corporate family tree data (sourced from D&B) Major customers (via FactSet) Financials Regulatory filings (for companies filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission) Analysis and profiles. Analyst reports are sourced from the Thomson Reuters Analyst Collection. The reports cover about 47,700 companies and 54 industries. Users have access to the three most recent reports on a company or industry from banks and brokers, with a seven-day embargo (in addition to any embargo required by each individual brokerage house).
Finally a “Reports” link provides various output templates, as well as a link out to D&B to purchase further premium reports.
The level of coverage varies depending on the company concerned; listed companies will typically have coverage from all the types of sources, whereas for privately held ones, items such as major customers or analyst reports will not be available.
To the right of the company snapshot screen is a “Discovery Pane” of news relating to the company in question, showing top-ten occurrences of most frequently mentioned
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companies, subjects, industries, regions and keywords relating to the company in the news over the last 90 days. This functionality is described in more detail later.
Unlike in the Company Dossier service from Factiva competitor LexisNexis, there are no links to legal or intellectual property information.
Company investor relations transcripts are available from licensed provider CQ FD Disclosure (formerly Voxant) and through web crawling - though the user will have to run a separate search in the Factiva Search Builder to get at them. A link to these transcripts in the Company Snapshot left-hand navigation would be useful - the vendor says it is looking into this as a possible future enhancement.
There is no link within the left-hand navigation to mergers and acquisitions information - though some information on M&A may be found in the Company Snapshot news area and via the Corporate Signals feature.
The left-hand navigation pane generally might benefit from some tweaks. Unlike in some competing services, there is no one-click access to commonly retrieved company financials such as annual or quarterly income; conversely there are some prominently displayed options in the left-hand navigation, such as Multimedia or Peer Comparison, which FreePint suspects may be rather less frequently used.
Corporate Signals: Recent Event Discovery The Corporate Signals feature is a quick way of zooming in on recent events relating to a company such as management changes, lawsuits, financial or product announcements, mergers and acquisitions or funding changes. In total, 13 signal types are supported.
These signals are based on proprietary event extraction technology, running against a 90-day archive of licensed and web English-language news content.
A pie chart display lets you see at a glance what kind of events have been most Figure 3: Corporate signals common.
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Clicking on a slice of the chart takes you through to a set of one-line summary descriptions of each event; clicking on the summary then takes you through to the underlying headlines.
Like other systems of this type, the feature can offer a good way of catching up on some recent events, and could be particularly useful for a salesperson or account manager looking for reasons to call a prospect or client.
For a researcher, it is likely to be one approach among several, not least due to its relatively short historical perspective and the fact that it will not pick up on events reported in non-English-language content.
Source Content Detail: Company Financials FreePint was impressed by the coverage of company financials in Factiva Companies & Executives - as much because of the consistency as because of the depth.
The FactSet-sourced financials for quoted companies typically give five years of history, with a good range of income, balance sheet and cash flow data. An extensive range of current ratio information is also given. Annual geographic and business segment breakdown history is also present and correct, again with five years of history.
In addition to annual figures, interim or quarterly data is also available for income, balance sheet and cash flow items, with figures for the last five reporting periods.
In all cases, the user can choose to switch between a table of the figures or a graphical display.
Below is an extract from the annual income data display for a listed US company.
Figure 4: Annual income data display for listed US company, Google
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Spot-testing on a variety of big-name quoted companies found a very solid level of coverage; and the rigour also extends well beyond the top end of the corporate world.
FreePint went in search of data on several small- to mid-cap companies which had gone public over the last year or two in Japan, India and Australia and in every case, found several years of financial history.
Even in the unusual instance of a privately held US company which had announced its IPO, then pulled back from going public at the last minute, FreePint found via Companies & Executives that FactSet had clearly combed through the offering documentation and garnered several years of historical figures.
Speed of updating is also impressive. FreePint was testing Factiva Companies & Executives in the thick of second-quarter earnings season, and was pleased to chance upon some quarterly figures flowing through to the system within a few days of announcement.
Financial coverage of unquoted companies also proved to be impressively thorough.
In some cases, due to the limitations of local filing requirements, no revenue information is to be found, or the user will find a one-year revenue estimate by D&B; but in very many cases, FreePint was pleased to see a full five years of private-company financials in Factiva Companies & Executives - a level of coverage at least equalling and not infrequently exceeding what FreePint has seen recently in competing services.
Other vendors may claim to carry much larger numbers of company or executive profiles; but those profile numbers should be subjected to close scrutiny, to determine how useful the level of data coverage actually is.
A couple of minor niggles relating to Factiva Companies & Executives company data should be noted. Unlike in several competing products, there is no quick option to switch the display of a company’s financials to another currency. Also, company financials are generally shown to only two decimal places, which is less than in some other vendor services.
Source Content Detail: Executive Content The executive profile information in Factiva Companies & Executives, like the company profile data, is now included as part of the standard Factiva package.
Dow Jones says there are around 40 million executive profiles on the service.
The level of detail varies depending on the person concerned; as a maximum, users may find: Contact details (at least to the level of address and general phone number) Biographical information from FactSet and/or from the “Generate” proprietary Dow Jones web crawling technology Compensation details, again gathered via Generate web crawling Lists of (where appropriate) fellow board members and senior management, with job titles and links to the relevant profiles, culled from a variety of sources (examples from FactSet, D&B, MarketLine, Generate and Hoppenstedt were seen) Finally, links to news stories mentioning both the person and company concerned.
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The level of detail varies; when the user does a search for an executive, the results screen gives a visual indication of the depth of detail available.
For quoted-company senior executives, extensive data may be found; for officers of unquoted companies, the service typically provides only general contact details, a name and job title, and a list of fellow-officers.
The vendor says it has put substantial efforts into cleaning up executive profiles, working to eliminate duplicates and incorrect or outdated records.
During testing, FreePint found that the level of accuracy was not at all bad and no out-and-out horrors were encountered. One example was seen of dual profiles for someone in both their old post and their current one, presumably indicating that the provider record for their old company had not yet been refreshed.
It was also noted that there are generally separate records for the same person, reflecting the different roles they hold at different organisations, for instance as officers of subsidiary companies.
Hyperlinks to the people information service LinkedIn are available alongside executive names at various points in the display, for instance when accessing the “Officers and Executives” link in the left-hand navigation of a company snapshot page or viewing a results set via an executive screening search; a LinkedIn icon is also available at the top of an individual executive profile.
Clicking on the LinkedIn icon has the effect of opening up a search in a new tab on the person’s first and last name and their company name; generally this approach works well.
No links were seen to other social media profiles such as Facebook or Twitter.
Based on random sampling, FreePint did not get the impression that coverage of individual email addresses is a major part of the value proposition.
Source Content Detail: Industry Profiles Industry background information is also available, via an “Industry” option under a Companies/Markets tab in the top-level navigation bar.
Dow Jones sticks to its strengths in this area, bringing to the fore its news coverage and industry classification scheme.
Searching via the SIC, NAICS and NACE industry schemes is possible; however, the default is the company’s proprietary Dow Jones Intelligent Indexing industry classification, which is applied both to the news coverage and the company records in the service.
Compared to the other classifications, this scheme appears far more in tune with the current business world, for instance easily supporting differentiation between internet search engine companies and portals - a distinction which is beyond the other classifications, if indeed they acknowledge the existence of the internet at all.
Industry-related results are then grouped into the three areas of news, peer comparison (as described elsewhere) and “analysis and profiles”, with source options of
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the Thomson Reuters Analyst Collection, Business Monitor International, MarketLine, Mergent Industry Reports, MarketResearch.com and Standard & Poor’s Industry Investment Reviews.
As in other products of this type reviewed by FreePint, the industry reports available are not always particularly relevant or helpful, as they tend to roll up to much broader industry classifications, or else zoom in unexpectedly on very particular regions or sub- topics.
More useful is the industry snapshot page. This is headed by the familiar Factiva news “discovery pane”, which displays news for the industry concerned plus Dow Jones indexing-based filters by company, industry, subject, region and keyword. Clicking on a term in any part of the display will instantly narrow the results.
Further down the snapshot is a definition of the industry; a listing of leading companies ranked by sales, with hyperlinks off to their profiles; a set of ratios and averages for the industry, based on quoted-company data for the latest fiscal year; and a graphic showing the distribution of companies in the industry by size. All of the financial elements are driven by FactSet data.
FreePint’s View: Sources
ü High-quality, well-maintained quoted- ü Access to Thomson Reuters Analyst company data, including for small- and Collection reports. mid-caps and recent IPOs û Limited detail on executives, especially at ü Good historical financials for private private companies companies (subject to availability under Limited granularity and relevance in national filing regulations) û industry reports ü Granular proprietary industry indexing scheme û Left-hand navigation links to content in company snapshots could be improved. ü Extensive collection of licensed and web- based news sources, in multiple languages
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Technology Factiva Companies & Executives, like the rest of Factiva, is built using the company’s proprietary technology, though leveraging underlying third-party components where appropriate for things such as search and categorisation.
The product was launched as far back as early 2005 and had been starting to look a little dated. However it has undergone a significant facelift over the last year and now has a common look and feel with the main Factiva database, with a crisp, clean, modern appearance.
The service is now fully integrated with Factiva, so its functionality is always accessible via a “Companies/Market” tab on the main navigation bar at the top of the product. This tab has further sub-options for Quotes, Charting, My Companies, Company, Industry and Executive.
Search and User Interactions The main starting point for a company search in Factiva Companies & Executives is the “Company” sub-tab.
A drop-down lets the user pick between “smart lookup”, company name, stock exchange ticker code, D&B DUNS number or registration ID. Smart lookup has an autocomplete function which will start to suggest the most likely matches as soon as the user begins to type - a handy timesaver.
Figure 5: Company lookup and autocomplete feature
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Below that search box, a “quick company screener” lets the user search from a selection of leading stock exchange, index membership and other group lists (e.g. FTSE 100, Dow Jones Industrials, DAX 30, Fortune 500), or from their own personal or group saved lists of companies.
Below that is a “Find Companies” section with expected screening options such as ownership type, industry, geographic location ratios and financials; but also a “Discover Companies in the News” option which lets you build a list of companies mentioned in recent news coverage based on your own keywords, or on a pre-defined Dow Jones subject list.
On launching the search, the user is shown a list of potential matches, or is taken straight to the Company Snapshot if there is only one match.
As well as the traditional list view of company names and key attributes, you can choose to include pie charts showing results grouped by aspects such as sales, employee numbers locations and ownership type, as well as (if you choose to filter also on news) top publications.
Figure 6: Company screening results - charts
Clicking on any chart segment further narrows the results; by navigating to the top of the screen, you can see a build-up of your search strategy and can further edit, modify or save it or click “Get List” to generate a list of the results.
Clicking on an individual company record of course takes you to the Company Snapshot for the organisation.
Executive screening functions on a similar principle, with options either to search by name or to screen by elements such as keywords, subjects, company, ownership type, position, industry, location or company size.
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The Company, Industry and Executive search areas also have handy links to your five most recently searched companies at the top right of the screen.
Searching and Filtering - News Content As part of the recent user interface improvements to Factiva Companies & Executives, Dow Jones has brought much of the power of Factiva news filtering to the Company Snapshot environment.
The news discovery pane on the right of the snapshot screen lets the user instantly filter the company-related news by the most frequently occurring companies, subjects, industries, regions and keywords relating to that company. Further filters can be easily or added or removed.
Dow Jones applies company codes to news for as many as 1.5 million companies. The coding functions across all the content on the service, in all languages.
FreePint saw the benefit of this on many occasions, picking up on timely extra detail about a company through, for example, Reuters news reports, profile-type information or local-language news coverage.
The ease of filtering on company-related news in the Company Snapshot area is currently best-in-class - though this is not an area in which to rest on one’s laurels, as other providers such as D&B Hoover’s and Avention have clearly been devoting attention to this area.
A few further refinements could still be made here. For instance, it would be useful to have the ability to filter news content in the snapshot discovery pane by source or by language, as you can within the Search Builder area of Factiva.
A smoother transition to the Search Builder area would also be handy, carrying over the knowledge of the company you are researching - currently you have to start your company search again as you move from area to area.
A briefing by the vendor made FreePint aware of another neat link between a company and news, accessible via the “Quotes” tab of the service: the ability to click on a point on a company share-price graph and instantly see the news relating to that time period, so helping you to understand a sudden peak or trough in the share price. Again, this is useful, but is currently a little tucked away.
Multiple Language Support Unusually for offerings in this segment, Factiva Companies & Executives is a truly multilingual product, in its user interface as much as in its content - the tools and settings icon at the top right lets the user instantly toggle the display between any of English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Traditional and Simplified Chinese language interfaces.
Outputs and Alerts Factiva Companies & Executives has a good selection of output options.
Links at the top right of a Company Snapshot let you add your company to one of your own company lists, or else to a “watchlist” which will give you email alerts on related news subjects or (where appropriate) on the lodging of an SEC filing.
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A few more alerting options could be handy, for instance to tell you that updated financials have been loaded - the vendor says it is considering this as a possible enhancement.
The customary “Reports” link in the left navigation of a Company Snapshot lets you generate an HTML or PDF summary report for a company based on a series of templates, including your own custom report format.
As in other services of this type, when viewing multi-year, multi-column financials for a company, it is possible to select and copy the data and paste it easily into a spreadsheet.
Target lists of companies or executives, generated via the company or executive screening functions, can be downloaded in spreadsheet format, again with options for you to customise the data elements included.
Icons are available at appropriate points to print, download or email selected articles or reports. For email distribution, there are options for HTML or plain text output, plus the ability to add a covering message and/or cost code.
Also, a “Company Radar” option, accessible via the “My Companies” sub-tab, gives an at-a-glance view of relative volumes of coverage for a group of companies against a list of news topics such as performance, management moves or new products and services.
Figure 7: Company Radar
The radar can be driven by pre-set lists of companies or subjects, or users can customise the displays to meet their specific needs.
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A little disappointingly, there are no tools other than standard browser functionality to aid export of the various graphs in the service, for instance the financials overviews in a Company Snapshot or the pie charts at the head of company screening results.
Administration and Support User preferences are accessed from an icon at the top right of the page. The options specific to company and market data allow you to set and change defaults such as the currency used for company screening; the sort order for a Company Radar display; or the default format to be used when generating reports on listed or unlisted companies.
The tools and settings icon also links to various customer service options. You can fill out an electronic enquiry form; phone customer support, via a wide range of local numbers; start a live chat session with a customer service representative; or share thoughts via a feedback form.
There is also a vast library of FAQ material, as well as self-help tutorials and learning documents and options to sign up for face-to-face or online training. A “Content Watch” area provides highly detailed information on source coverage, including alerts on additions and deletions and information about loading delays for key sources.
FreePint found, when contacting Factiva customer support on highly detailed content and user interface issues, that staff were extremely knowledgeable, very courteous and very quick to respond.
FreePint’s View: Technology
ü Clear, modern, easy-to-use product ü Vast company coding coverage, including interface for unquoted companies ü Strong integration between company ü Extensive language support profile content and related news û Could be easier to download graphical ü Extensive company and executive representations of data. screening options
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Purchasing and Value Factiva Companies & Executives offers value in the same areas as other services of this type: Helping users to generate and protect revenue By assisting with sales, prospecting and customer care Helping users to save time, by bringing information together from multiple sources in easily digestible format. Dow Jones particularly emphasises the value that customers derive from the close integration of profile data and news in the product, thus helping users to gain a fully up-to-date picture of the state of a company, rather than relying on a historical snapshot.
The vendor is not the only one to stake this claim, but does have a particularly strong case, given the global and multilingual nature of its content collection and the tight integration of its news searching functionality into the company, industry and executive profile areas.
Product Maturity and Development Plan As mentioned previously, Factiva Companies & Executives has been on the market for almost a decade.
Recently it has benefited from a very substantial makeover to improve its user interface and integrate it fully with the mainstream Factiva service.
Other recent enhancements include addition of an “Altman-Z” score, a formula used to predict the likelihood of bankruptcy.
Dow Jones says future plans focus on even tighter integration with Factiva. Regarding sources, the vendor says it is broadly happy with the content coverage that it has for the product, though it is always open to customer suggestions for further improvements.
Competition and Alternative Offerings Obvious potential competitors to Factiva Companies & Executives include the Hoover’s service from D&B; Avention (formerly OneSource); Company Dossier from LexisNexis; and potentially Orbis and other regional variants from BvD.
Key strengths for the Dow Jones product are its company data/news integration; and the strength of its business and financial news coverage, notably through the profusion of content languages (not a strong point for most competitors in this space) and the near-real-time access to Dow Jones and Reuters financial newswires.
On the question of company financial data, if you need very deep financials, including distinctions between normalised and as-reported numbers and history going back in excess of five years, then an Avention or a BvD solution would offer you more on those fronts.
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If five years of financial history is sufficient and tight integration of extensive global, multilingual news content matters to you, then Factiva Companies & Executives is worth serious consideration.
Pricing Factiva Companies & Executives pricing is on a per-user basis, with discounts for larger numbers of users.
While the product was previously available as a standalone or add-on service, it is now systematically included as part of the subscription to the flagship Factiva database.
It is offered as a global package, without regional sub-sets.
In common with other similar vendors, Dow Jones declined to disclose actual price points.
Value: FreePint’s View In FreePint’s view, Factiva Companies & Executives is a worthy contender in its field.
Testing of the Dow Jones service reveals that it delivers very respectable coverage of both listed and unlisted company financials - perhaps surprisingly so, for a vendor whose traditional primary focus has never been in the company data area.
Couple that decent financial coverage tightly with easily searchable global, multilingual news and add solid screening and list-building capabilities and you have potentially a very useful service.
This reprint was created from a report originally published in September 2014 and was accurate as of that date. Reprinted with the permission of Free Pint Ltd. All other rights reserved.
For further information, contact: This chapter is also Caitlin Cricco, Marketing published as an article +1-212-416-3457 in your FreePint [email protected], Subscription: www.dowjones.com Factiva Companies & Executives (Value - Competitors, Development & Pricing) Click to login now and read online »
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Chris Porter is director of Porter Walford Consulting, an organisation which specialises in market research, market size and share and competitor analysis relating to the information industry. Clients include some of the world’s leading information-intensive companies.
Chris is the co-author of a forthcoming report on global market size and share for Media Intelligence information and software services.
Chris previously worked for Dow Jones, Factiva and Reuters, analysing B2B and consumer information markets worldwide. Expertise includes corporate and legal, risk and compliance, financial and business and public relations and corporate communications markets.
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