Orbis
Orbis is provided by Bureau van Dijk and contains annual report data from the last 10 years of 79 million public and private companies worldwide. Bureau van Dijk collects this data from local sources, for example: data of dutch companies is taken from the Chamber of Commerce. This annual report data is processed by Bureau van Dijk, so that companies of different countries can be compared (this is called the Global Format).
Access
You find the link to Orbis in the list of financial databases. To get access to Orbis from home, you need a VPN-connection. Our licence is limited to 8 simultaneous users. Orbis works best in Internet Explorer.
The history in Orbis is limited: Orbis goes 10 years back. If you need older data that's only available in Orbis, you can contact the Datateam.
Settings
Under Settings in the upper right corner you can adjust several settings: the most important is the default currency. Under Lists (available at the right side of the screen, after you click Settings) you can adjust the number of companies you see on one page (the default is 25, that's sometimes too little).
Support
Under Help in the upper right corner you can find the User Guide. In that guide you can find the definitions of the annual report data items and ratios under Data Details > Financial Data > Format definitions. The Quick Tour is useful to get to know Orbis.
Identifiers
With the search criterium ‘Identification Numbers’ you can upload lists of:
- BvD ID numbers
- ISIN numbers
- SEDOL numbers
- Ticker Symbols
You can copy a lists of these codes from Excel and paste them. The codes must be separated by a comma or start on a new line.
The following identifiers can be downloaded from Orbis (by adding them to a list of companies):
| Can be used in |
BvD ID Number | Zephyr (M&A) |
ISIN Number | Datastream, Thomson One Banker, CompuStat Global |
SEDOL Number | Datastream, Thomson One Banker, CompuStat Global |
Ticker Symbol | CompuStat North America, CRSP |
