Picking Winners in an Emerging Fragmented Industry

Picking the eventual winner starts with identifying the players.

The SEC requires companies to include competitive information in their annual reports (but not in the quarterly reports). Most companies do a reasonably complete job of describing both their major and lesser competitors in the report, but they often don’t say which is which. The company’s competitive discussion is always included in a section titled “Competition.” The annual reports are lengthy, so use your browser’s find function (Ctrl-F on a PC, Cmd-F on a Mac) to search for “competition” rather than scrolling through the entire report.

Reuters frequently copies the annual report’s competitive discussion almost verbatim into ...

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