LibGuides: Company Research : Annual Reports/Filings

Historic Annual Reports

Mergent Archives
Provides annual reports and other filings information back to the early 1900s. This includes over 108,000 Canadian documents, over 228,000 U.S. documents, and over 370,000 international documents. Also includes Mergent's full collection of digitized manuals dating back to the first manual published in 1909 which includes information extracted from annual reports.
Canadian Corporate Reports: McGill Digital Archive
This digital report collection consists of historic annual reports for about 2,000 Canadian corporations across different business sectors. For many companies this goes back to the 19th century. Most recent reports will be 2005, as this archive has not been updated since then.
Canadian Filings on Microfiche (Micromedia)
These are available in storage at the Bronfman Business Library and can be requested at the reference desk. These filings on fiche are available for Canadian publicly-traded companies back to the late 1970s/early 1980s.

Government Filings Sites

SEDAR
Provides access to electronic filings submitted by public companies and mutual funds to the Canadian Securities Administrators from January 1997 to the present.
EDGAR
Provides access to submissions from public companies required by law to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Documents from 1994 to present are available for most companies. Full text searching available for the last 4 years.

Databases with Advanced Search Options

It can be useful to leverage the powerful search engines offered by Mergent Online and Lexis Nexis Academic when retrieving filings. Both these databases allow you to search a range of fields and filing types.

Nexis Uni
Select the Business image under the Discovering Topics heading. Under Company Search on the right select SEC Filings from the drop down then you can search for a company by name or ticker. You can search within your results by filing type.
Mergent Online
Where you wish to obtain an annual report for a company in Canada, the United States or beyond it is easiest to search the name of the company of interest and then select the "Reports" tab. Annual reports in PDF format are available for most companies back to the late 1990s.

For sophisticated searching and retrieval of annual reports or other filings Mergent Online provides access to EDGAR and SEDAR filings. Click on the "Government Filings" tab. Supports searching by company name or ticker symbol and searching for text within SEC documents using the Text Search edit box. Date limits and filing type specifications may also be applied. Filings are available in excel, microsoft word, html and PDF formats.

Annual Reports - Public Web Sites

AnnualReports.com
Provides access to annual reports for companies globally. Usually most recent year only available in PDF format. Possible to browse reports by exchange, industry, sector or alphabetically by company name. Also includes investor fact sheets plus a link to Responsibility Reports.com a free service providing access to corporations' responsibility reports available online.

If you cannot find the annual report you are looking for using SEDAR, EDGAR or York University Library databases, you may wish to consider using these freely available public web sites as a source of information.

Public Register Annual Reports
Provides free annual reports of public companies trading on the NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, OTC and TSX exchanges.
Companies House
Allows searching and viewing of official filings by U.K. companies with the government. This is made available by Companies House - the official UK agency, (and a division of the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy), that incorporates and dissolves companies, and collects and makes available data that companies are legally required to make available to the public. This site is currently in beta mode, and allows free searching of filings, though archival reports are available on a paid subscription basis only.

Company Web Sites and Filings Information

The web sites of publicly traded companies typically have a section labelled "Investors" or "Investor Relations". Here you will find links to recent annual reports and other company filings. Note, however, that this is typically not as comprehensive as what you will find for the company on the web sites of security regulators, e.g. SEDAR or EDGAR.

Annual Reports and Company Strategy

The MD&A (Management Discussion and Analysis) section of an annual report is very useful when analyzing company strategy.

According to Investopedia, it's "[a] section of a company's annual report in which management discusses numerous aspects of the company, both past and present"...providing "an overview of the previous year of operations and how the company fared in that time period. Management will usually also touch on the upcoming year, outlining future goals and approaches to new projects".