Assignment 5: Company Profile

Introduction

Rapid prototyping and additive manufacturing are expanding businesses, with new companies and new technologies appearing each year. Imagine that you work for a private investment fund that wants to begin investing in this industry. You and a dozen other young analysts are tasked with writing brief profiles of companies that might be worth a closer look. For a large company, your fund could decide to simply buy their stock. For small companies, your fund might decide to supply venture capital to help the company develop and eventually go public -- or they might decide to back a competing business.

Each of you will be assigned a company to profile. Your job is not to "sell" the company -- you're an analyst, not a PR flack. Your job is to provide an honest and insightful look at what they're doing and their future prospects.

In the first part of this assignment, you are asked to develop a two-page profile of your assigned company. In the second part, you will be asked to read profiles of three other companies written by your fellow analysts and critique them. Each part will be graded separately.

Questions to Address

Some of the companies being considered are large, publicly traded industry leaders, while others are tiny startups. So not all questions below will be applicable, and the level of detail in your profile will have to be adjusted to keep your report to 2 pages. Try to address as many of the items below as you can.
  1. History: when was the company founded, and by whom?

  2. Location: where is the company headquarters? Where are their products made? What is the URL of their web site?

  3. Type of sales: do they sell hardware, software, services, or a mix?

  4. What are their most significant products?

  5. Ownership: who owns the company? Are they publicly traded? If so, what is their stock symbol and current share price?

  6. Acquisitions: has the company purchased other significant companies? Or has the company been itself purchased by a larger company?

  7. Financials: what is the company worth? What are their annual sales? (This information may not be available for privately held companies.)

  8. Who are their major competitors?

  9. If they're a startup: who is funding them, and how much funding have they received?

  10. What does the company's future look like? Where are they headed?

Sources of Information

You can use any publicly available information sources for this report. (Please, no industrial espionage.) Be sure to cite your sources. Some good places to look:
  • The company's web site, under "About Us" or "Investor Relations".

  • The company's SEC filings (for publicly traded companies).

  • Wikipedia.

  • Articles in industry newsletters or the popular press.

  • Telephone or email: if you have specific questions that can't be answered from any of the above sources, call up the company and ask.

Critiques

In the second part of the assignment you will be assigned three profiles to read and critique. Each critique should be about a paragraph. Click here for access to the critiqes and to see your assignments. (This link is accessible only via a CMU IP address.)

Questions to address:

  • Is the profile accurate, as far as you can determine? (Check the facts.)

  • Are the claims well supported by citations?
  • Did the profile fail to address any relevant topics?

  • How is the writing? Is the information logically organized? Are there spelling errors, grammatical errors, or passages that are awkwardly phrased?

  • How could the profile be improved?

Hand-In Instructions

Your profiles (2 page PDF) are due on Wednesday, April 22. Hand them in via Autolab.

Critiques (1 PDF file with three critiques) are due on Monday, May 4.

Grading

  • 10 points for a well-researched and well-presented company profile.

  • 5 points for thoughtful critiques of three other company profiles.
Dave Touretzky
Last modified: Tue May 12 21:28:45 EDT 2015