Company Category
About the data
It seems like such a simple question; what industry or sector does a company belong to? While the question might be simple, the answer hardly is.
Depending on the your perspective a company like Zalando SE might be an apparel company (it sells apparel products), a tech company (it is an online market place), a financial services company (it is a holding of other companies), or all of the above.
As a result methodology designers often apply the industry or sector that makes most sense for their assessment. Pragmatic and understandable of course, but where does that leave us in terms of comparability across datasets?
ISIC has defined an international classification of productive activities which lots of nations have adopted to classify their companies and to which lots of different classifications and taxonomies have been mapped - the largest effort to date to harmonize the different systems and approaches out there.
WikiRate sources these ISIC codes from the OpenCorporates registry. However, not all companies on WikiRate have been assigned ISIC code (as of September 2021 not even 5%).
That is where this metric comes in; an attempt to classify all companies on WikiRate by building on the ISIC and other widely used categorizations. As much as possible the data is sourced from other categorization schemes (see formula below), which is then manually supplemented through other research efforts.
This categorization is adapted slightly from ISIC Division categories to a somewhat more simplified number of categories that mostly show what place in the value chain companies find themselves in.
Possible categories include:
- Financial
- Wholesale and retail
- Raw material producer (including agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, and quarrying)
- Infrastructure (including energy supply, water and waste management, construction, transportation and storage, real estate)
- Health and education
- Science and technology (including information and communication, professional, scientific and technical)
- Other (including accommodation and food services, adminstrative and support services, public administration and defense, and arts, entertainment, and recreation)
This should be considered a work in progress and a first step in developing a more robust system on WikiRate to organizing companies in industry and sector groups.
Note: Across prominent data pages on the WikiRate platform, you will find a Company Category filter. This will help you quickly narrow down the list of companies that you might be interested in.
Want this metric to be even more prominent? If you bookmark it, it will show up in your quick filters on the different pages.
Formula
# how ISIC Industry Sections (left) map to Company Categories (right) isicMap = A: "R" B: "R" C: "M" D: "I" E: "I" F: "I" G: "W" H: "I" I: "O" J: "S" K: "F" L: "I" M: "S" N: "O" O: "O" P: "H" Q: "H" R: "O" S: "O" T: "O" U: "O" # how SIC Divisions (left) map to Company Categories (right) sicMap = E: "I" I: "O" # how Alliance for Corporate Transparency sectors (left) map to Company Categories (right) actMap = "Infrastructure": "I" "Hospitality & Recreation": "O" "Services": "O" # translate lists using maps mappedCodes = (answer, answerMap) -> return unless isKnown answer codes = answer.map (a) -> answerMap[a] codes = codes.filter Boolean return codes if codes.length mappedCodes(isic, isicMap) || mappedCodes(sic, sicMap) || mappedCodes(act, actMap) || "Unknown"
