Management of Multinationals in Crisis

Your objective is to identify environmental factors that shape the industry that your company operates in.

  • Analyze the industry structure. What stage of the life cycle is the industry in?
  • Who are suppliers? Who are customers? Who are the key competitors?
  • What trends are affecting the industry?

Industry Profile

Industry overviews examine current market forces, analyze performance, identify recent trends, list leading companies, and provide aggregate financial data and forecasts.

Business Trends and Country Risk Reports

Become familiar with the business environment in the company's home and host (site of the crisis) country.

Find Competitors

Many databases offer profiles of public companies that include lists of the company's top competitors. Using one of these profiles is an easy way to find the companies that are active in a particular industry.

Find Suppliers

Two databases offer supply chain information: Mergent Online and Bloomberg.

Mergent Online offers in the "Supply Chain" tab public company profiles that highlight the relationships between a company's major customers, suppliers, competitors and partners. All supplier connections are identified from SEC filings. Suppliers can be named by the company or can be named as customers by other companies.

Bloomberg offers a function for supply chain analysis, SPLC <GO> , that tracks a company's key customers, suppliers and competitors. For example, to find Amazon's suppliers, search by the company ticker and function. You would type: AMZN <Equity> SPLC <Go>.  Bloomberg is only available in the Subotnick Financial Services Center.