- [Nicole] Hello. Welcome back. This lesson now is about building a company profile, and the aims of the section are we're going to learn how to find out what a company does as its kind of core business, like the main things it does. We're going to learn how to find out company locations. And we're going to get to grips with how to use Annual Reports when researching a company. So I've mentioned this in the very first introduction about choosing a company, but honestly like the best way to kind of develop your research skills is literally just practise. 

So I really recommend following along with this video and pausing me. So when I say let's find the company locations, you pause the video and then you go and have a chance, and you have a look where those companies are based, for example, and then you add that to your document or your mind map. You might already have chosen a company, because you're already fighting one or organising against one. Otherwise, just choose something that interests you. There're bigger companies like G4S that definitely a lot easier to find kind of accessible information on. 

So again, simple, simple, simple. Start with the basics, okay? And a lot of times like I'll talk to organisers and I'll say something that I found out about a company and they're like, "Oh my God, how did you find that?" And I'm like, "It's literally not rocket science. It was on their website." And we forget all the time, but please just look at the company's website. Like there's so much information on there. So yeah. Check out the website, read it's about page or the what we do page. And if you're researching a company that doesn't have a website, don't worry, we're going to introduce tonnes of other tools of ways to kind of research a company through the rest of the course. 

So on a company's website, they should hopefully have published an Annual Report. So this is a report that obviously comes out once a year, and it's written to shareholders and to investors, and people that the company want people to be impressed by them. They want investment. They want people to buy shares, for example. So yeah, just please be aware of the spin. The report is designed to make the company look as good as possible. They are mostly used by large companies, but smaller companies do publish them too, but they're really useful way of getting to grips with what a company is and what they do. So yeah. Generally contains a description of what they've been doing, and it also includes its annual accounts. I've got a whole module on how to read company accounts. And you can generally download this report from their website. 

So yeah. The beginning, like just try and get a handle on the company's core business. So you might be asking like, what does it sell? What are its main products and services or it's kind of like business lines? Does it have any key brands or trademarks? And I talk about like keep it simple, but you don't always know what a company's kind of core business is, because of their front facing brand, like one of the companies we'll talk about later on. They're coal mining company. They do open cast coal in the UK and from the face of it you'd think that that was just their main thing that they were just real profiteering coal miners, but actually they have a huge property line of houses they're developing and it's kind of like 40% of their business or something in its property. So yeah, it is worth kind of digging deeper to understand how they're actually making money and keeping afloat. 

So one example here is G4S, and they've conveniently described what their services are, and their primary service lines. So secure solutions, care and justice services, cash solutions, specialist outsource services, security systems and technology. And that could be just complete like corporate gobbledygook and not make sense. So it is worth reading into these in more detail to try and get a grips of like actually what their key areas of work are. Okay. So once we've kind of got an idea of the key business, we're going to want to also understand where the company is based. So most companies have like a head office that kind of coordinates their operations. So you might want to find out where that head office is, where they have other offices or factories, and certain companies they'll make this really easy for you. So this is Kier's, oh. This is Kier's. From their website, it's a little map of the UK. And as you can see they've conveniently color-coded it for us. So we can see the head office, the regional offices here in red, and their construction sites, and their kind of engineering offices. So that's really useful because they are building prisons and people are fighting them across the UK. 

How do you find these company locations? So more often than not, they can be found on the company's website. If not, they're often listed in Annual Reports. Otherwise, you might need to find them through Companies House, and we're going to go through that in our future lessons. And website searches can also reveal locations that aren't in their reports or on Companies House. So it's always worth having a quick Google to see. So again, we're going to go back to G4S, and they've got a whole convenient page here of where we operate. So they are in 85 countries around the world. We can see that in Africa, they are doing all sorts of stuff in 24 African countries, Europe and Middle East. So they've obviously just given us an overview and then they've got here, you can see this as most likely their main office, but you might look at their contact details and be able to see where their other offices are. So I don't think you can see it on this page. However, I have screenshotted their little section about the UK. So coming back full, you can see here that they've listed their Global Head Office in London. They've got another UK office and they've got an Ireland office. So yeah. Most big companies will make that information available to people quite easily. And like I said, I just showed you the example then, but you can see like with G4S, like their global locations. So here you go to their websites, you can actually go to their like specific regional websites, where you'll find even more information and yeah. I always recommend going to the like country's specific site that you're trying to research. Okay. Yes. Okay. 

So now we're going to look at an Annual Report. So I've got G4S's one here, and you should find this in your lesson, your lesson files section. So we're going to go to page 232. Okay. I'll just scroll down a bit more. Okay. So yeah. This is G4S's 2019 report, and you can see here that they've got a list of their subsidiaries, and you can see all of the countries of incorporation. So we've got them in Argentina, we've got them in Kenya, we've got them in South Africa. And you can see like the name of that kind of local registered company in that country. And yeah, they've also conveniently listed all the specific company addresses. So we've got them in Bahrain, we've got them in Bangladesh with their address. So yeah. Again, like it can be quite tiring looking on a website and copy and pasting lots of information. So an Annual Report like this that's got it all listed out normally in alphabetical order or in regional order is like really, really useful. So yeah. I just wanted to show that to you as an example. Okay. 

And yeah, I've just put a little screenshot of that in here. And finally, like there might already be people that have mapped certain things out. So for example, with Corporate Watch, we had this Wreckers of the Earth project, where we looked at all of the big companies within central London, and their kind of role in like environmental harm. So oil and gas companies, agribusiness, like all sorts of things. So yeah, you can click on this link and have a look at that and download a high resolution copy. Yeah. So we've looked at company websites. We've looked at Annual Reports. 

The other options are looking at media sources of companies. So newspapers can be incredibly useful. Like the Financial Times, for example, will have like regular updates about companies. You can look at the kind of business sections of newspapers or specialist business media. Local media, it can be really useful depending on who you're researching. Libraries might have like media archives as well. And then there's obviously like investigative sources. So organisations which it's their job to kind of investigate things more thoroughly like Private Eye or Which? So there's a link here. You can see kind of web links to like all of these different options. That's from DIY Investigating Companies guide. And yes, there's also really useful other sources of company information. 

So investor presentations are absolutely like amazing sometimes at getting intel about certain projects. So these are presentations that are given often on a quarterly basis where investors, so shareholders, people that have put money into a company will watch like an online webinar or webcast, and someone from the company is talking about, oh, we've got this new mine in Serbia or this is in the pipeline. And it's a really great way of like finding out information. And it's also a good time to ask questions. Like so if you're in a zoom or something you could ask a particular question. And because they're in this kind of sales mode, they're potentially likely to share a bit more with you. You might have to be registered as a shareholder. However, lots of companies put their presentations up as I kind of free kind of accessible archive. Likewise, there'll often be Annual General Meetings which I know kind of campaigners have often gone to and demonstrated at or joined somehow. But notes and minutes and reports from meetings will often be on company websites. 

Some of the Google tools I used before like looking for PDFs or PowerPoints can be a great way of finding kind of internal company documents. And yeah, just as an example, see how long it takes to load. I might not include this if it takes a long time, but I've been researching a new gold mine in Serbia for someone and Rio Tinto have a website with loads of free presentations for investors. So they've got things you can download from historical seminars. So what have we got here? Got their annual results. They've got a lot of mines in Western Australia. So they've got things about that. They've got lithium markets, so that's relating to Serbia. So yeah. They're really, really useful places of information. Okay. So that's our Annual Report. All right. Okay. So just one final example. I was researching a charity actually who had won a contract to run the children's prison in Kent that locks up 12 to 17 year olds. Absolutely horrific treatment of children in there. There's been lots of abuse scandals historically, and to get a kind of understanding of this charity, because on the front of it, they seemed like they've got some sort of integrity or charitable aims, and it was the best way to kind of understand them. And their worldview was I read a book that was written by one of their members, and it was a small book, and it was just really interesting to kind of get a handle on how they've evolved over time, sort of projects they're doing, what's led them to run a prison for example, and to potentially understand how to best kind of target them. Like how a campaign could be strategic in showing that they're not in aligned with their values by running this children's prison. 

So definitely always have a little look around. See if you could maybe a CEO of a company has like written... CEOs love writing their biography, maybe you can read that and you can better understand what makes a company tick. Okay. So yeah. So please again, do the practical stuff. If you're working on a company at the moment, then take a look at the Annual Report, take a look at the website. Try and understand what the key markets are, what things are selling, how is that company making money? We'll look at that more. We'll build on that through the course, but yeah. Please take some time now to start building your company profile.