So this morning on the radio I heard that American Airlines’ parent company, AMR Corp, is filing for bankruptcy. First off, who knew American Airlines was owned by someone else? I thought they were the parent company. But they’re not. They’re the subsidiary. So I was curious about AMR Corp. Luckily we have a very rich collection of business resources for me to quickly and easily find out more about AMR Corp.
Using the Business: Company Profiles subject database page, I found many different resources. A few were even suggested as the best profiles or directory-type information. But I am familiar with Business & Company Resource Center and opted to use that. Here’s what I got with one search on AMR Corp.
In one easy search I got all this info. This first page had their business, SIC and NAICS codes, annual sales, SWOT analysis, and officers (plus much, much more). But beyond this, I am able from this page to get articles (over on the left side) and tons of info using the buttons across the top. INVESTMENT REPORTS gave me reports from today and older. FINANCIALS is their income statement. RANKINGS was really interesting. It gave rankings of really diverse things (for example, they were listed as a best airline company for gay and lesbian employees, but ranked as one of the world’s companies with the lowest reputation for quality of management. Ouch.). RANKINGS also shows market share. It was there I found out that they had 29% of the medical transportation share in 2006, but by 2008 they had only 1%. INDUSTRY OVERVIEW gave me both industry overviews and Datamonitor Industry Market Research. Only problem here was this industry stuff was old. 2009 old. In business years, that’s nearly obsolete info.
That’s when I decided to take the librarian’s word for it and use what was considered the “best source for in-depth company profiles”: Standard & Poor’s NetAdvantage. This one I’m not familiar with (which is why I chose Business & Company Resource Center). Agreed, Standard & Poor’s NetAdvantage had a lot more information that was more current. But as a non-business person, it was mostly over my head. But the good news is, everything was really recent. Stock reports were from this week. Press release was from today. Industry survey was from June.
The takeaway from all this is that you’re better off using a few resources from our robust collection instead of just one. My original intent this morning was to find out a little bit about AMR Corp and what else they owned. I got that and loads more info by using just these two resources. Had I really needed to pursue this further, I would have used a few more of the company profiles resources like Mergent Online. I would have gone to the Business: Industry Profiles page for a list of several sources for current industry info. And I would have used the International Directory of Company Histories to get a 7 page history of how AMR Corp got to today.
Finally, if I hadn’t found what I needed after about 5 minutes of searching, I would have asked a librarian. Cuz I just don’t have that kind of time to spend floundering around. Obviously, they know their stuff cuz they compiled pages of best sources for my topic.
I guess this is what happens when I listen to the news. I should just go back to listening to KQ in the morning.
