ORBIS is a robust database for more than 400 million companies and entities across the globe.  

• Compare data on private and public companies

• Identify corporate ownership structures

• View comprehensive financial information from over 40 million companies.

• Standardized data from more than 170 separate providers, treats and appends.  

• Orbis includes 10 rolling years of financial data. For historic financial data, use Orbis Historic.

For assistance in using BvD ORBIS or in forming a search strategy, please contact Gwyneth Crowley, Librarian for Economics.

1. Click on magnifying glass in the upper-left corner to navigate to the search screen.

2. Use the Quick Search Bar to find information on a company when you already know the name.

3. Left click inside the Quick Search Bar.

4. Type a company name or BvD ID to search. (Tip: Add a comma and a country to narrow results.)

5. Click on the company listing to view results.

If you need to find all the companies in the ORBIS database that meet specific criteria, use the "Find a search criterion" search box.

Screenshot of Opening Screen

• Find a Company  - Quick Search Box  (Upper left screen)
• Find a Search Criteria - Right-hand side search box
• Training Programs  - Click on the orange square with a white question mark
• Anonymous main user ID number 

Training videos are available within the ORBIS database.

Click on the orange square with a white question mark and you will see the screen below.  Click on Training Progam followed by Advanced.

The peer analysis is a benchmarking tool you can use to compare the companies in your active search against one another. The comparison can be based on any financial variable for any of the available years.

The companies can also be benchmarked against some summary statistics that are calculated on the entire group of companies in your search.

The results of the peer analysis can be viewed in a table and illustrated with a variety of graphs.

Build a peer analysis

Example:

You may wish to analyze banks in emerging markets to see why some of them do better than others. You would create a search on those banks and then open the peer analysis. Once you have defined the key variables and ranked the results, you can analyse which bank is performing better than its peers. You can examine what makes it so special, and compare the results against previous years to see which companies performed better after the credit crisis.

Create your search

Build a peer analysis for your current search results by loading or creating a search for the companies you're interested in.

You can analyze between 2 and 2,500 companies.

Choose your peer analysis

Once you have created your search, go to Tools > Peer analysis. Here you can choose one of the analyses that we have prepared, or you can create one from scratch.

When you choose a predefined analysis, you can still adapt it as you would a new analysis and then save it under a different name so you can reuse it later.

Select the companies and statistics

By default, when you launch a peer analysis, all the companies in your search are inserted as primary variables, one per row.

By clicking the edit icon, you can:

Select or clear individual companies in your search.

Define which summary statistics you want to add.

Choose your variables

By default, the financial variables are displayed in the columns. When you click the edit icon, you can select the variables you want to use.

Add a rank, quartile or decile

You can choose to add an extra column alongside each of the values to show the appropriate rank, quartile or decile.

Choose the layout of the table

When launching a peer analysis, the latest available year of financial data is selected as the basis of the table, but you can also use the company or variables if you want.