A company's annual report reports on and discusses the company's financial performance during the previous year and provides information about plans for the company's future direction. Publicly held corporations need to make their annual reports available to investors at the end of each financial year.
Annual reports can be found using the following:
Click on the links above to learn how to find company annual reports in each of the sources listed.
You can often find a company's annual reports on the company's own website. Annual reports can generally be found in the area of the company's website that contains information for investors.
You may also be able to find a company's annual report by using using a search engine such as Google or Bing and searching for the company's name and the phrase annual report -- for example:
starbucks "annual report"
Note: With the exception of investment companies, companies are not required to file their annual reports with EDGAR, the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. But companies are required to file Form 10-K or 10-KSB, and these forms contain much of the same information as annual reports.
Search EDGAR (see search tips).
You can also find some companies' current and historic annual reports in UMGC Library databases:
First, click on the icon of three horizontal lines toward the top left-hand side of the page:
Then click on the Browse link from the resulting sub-menu.
On the resulting page, click on the ProQuest Annual Reports Collection link.
You can then browse the list of companies or use the search box to search for a particular company's annual report. Put quotation marks around a company name consisting of two or more words (for example, "general electric").
Enter a company's name in the "Search for a Company" box at the top of the database's home page, putting quotation marks around a company name consisting of two or more words (for example, "yum brands"). After clicking on the company's name on the search results page, click on the Annual Reports link on the left-hand side of the company information page, below the "Advanced" heading:
Enter a company's name followed by "annual report" in the search box on the database's home page, putting quotation marks around a company name consisting of two or more words (for example, "southwest airlines" "annual report").
You will probably not find a particular company's annual reports in a print book, but there are numerous print books available in catalogUSMAI, the UMGC Library catalog, that describe how to write and/or interpret an annual report. These include:
The UMGC Library's e- books are also unlikely to contain particular companies' annual reports, but you can find information about annual reports by entering the following in the search box on the E-Books tab on the Library's home page:
"annual report*"