Another of our short videos to help you get the best possible use from Biznews.com. This is a guide to using our library of information on JSE listed companies – from the most up to date price and news data through to every price-sensitive report issued by the business in the past decade and a half. Warning: watching this video will open up a new world of investment information. – AH
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEOaOl1Ucuc?rel=0]
ALEC HOGG:  In this ‘How To’ video, we’re going to have a look at the Companies Pages on Biznews.com. The best place to start (as always) is to open the homepage of Biznews, and here it is. When we go across to the JSE Data Page, you can go anywhere along there.
Let’s start here with the Top 100 CEO’s tab. That will take us to a table – well, to a story and then to a table – on the 100 Chief Executives of the biggest companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
It’s a fun table. You can play around with this in any way you want. You can rank the CEO’s by age. You can rank the companies by alphabetical name. You can rank the CEO’s by the years that they have served, or in both ascending and descending order. We have the default rank in alignment with the market capitalisation of these companies.
Why I’m taking you to this page is because it gives us a good way to start by going into the companies themselves. If you see number nine, David Constable, he’s 52 years old. He’s been in the job for three-and-a-half years and he runs Sasol, so let’s find out more about Sasol itself. By clicking on that link, it will take you to the Company’s Page on Biznews. There’s Sasol’s company page – quite self-explanatory – with a Share Price graph that you can have a look at, at different time periods. Also, to the right of this is the most recent day’s trading. A little outline if Sasol itself: market cap etcetera, what’s happened in the past year – the decline in the oil price has certainly hit this poor company in the last little while. As you can see, there’s the one-year Share Price Performance.
The latest financial results (these were for the year to June 2014). When it says ‘final’, it means full year. Interim means half year. Then there are the latest Stock Exchange News Service announcements from Sasol. These are important because every time a company issues a statement of any kind that could affect the Share Price, it’s forced to do so on the Stock Exchange News Service. It’s a wonderful amount of information that you can pick up here.
Let’s just go to the most recent of these, which was issued on the 21st of November, which talks about the results of the Annual General Meeting of Sasol, which were handled on that day. You can have a look at how well the directors were voted for or against. It seems as through they’re pretty happy with David Constable as Chief Executive. Four-hundred-and-ninety-eight million shares voted in favour of him and only fifty-two thousand voted against. That is a rather standard document, which is sent out by Sasol after its Annual General Meeting. You’ll find that from every company.
However, there are much more interesting announcements that one will find from companies, not least, their financial results themselves – and here we go. In Sasol’s instance, it’s on that first page: the audited financial results for the year to end June in great detail. You can go through this at your leisure.
What you will find on every company page though, is this very important alphabet. What the alphabet tells us here is it gives us a link through to all of the companies that are listed by that name. Ergo, all the companies starting with an ‘s’ would be on the page that I’ve just clicked, which takes us to ‘s’, including of course, Sasol. There it is, over there. It will give you the market cap. It will give you the latest Share Price and it will give you the performance of that share in the past year.
The other important thing to have a look at is the short name of the company because that becomes very useful. In Sasol’s case, it’s SOL and we’ll use that now by finding all historical data that we might possibly require by going to the SENS announcement/SENS statements themselves. We carry two days of SENS statements on Biznews at any one time. However, when you want to look back further in history – and that’s terribly easy to do – you click on the SENS Archive, put in the name of the company (or the short name of the company you’re looking for), in this case Sasol, the starting date that you might want to begin on… In this case, let’s go back to 1998. You’d have to click on the 1st of December 1998 (it needs to know the date, exactly) and you’ll be able to, at the click of a button, by asking the magnifying glass to help you; it will give you all of those SENS announcements and Stock Exchange News Service Announcements going back all the years.
What a treasure chest of information for anybody who’s looking to do some investigation into what the company has done over the years. As you can see, but on the 30th November 2004, there was an announcement there as well of the results of the Annual General Meeting – very different directors who were around ten or so years ago. Paul Kruger, Brian Connellan, Pat Davies, Jürgen Schrempp, and Mrs Bradley. I think most of those have now departed and have either gotten a little bit too old to serve on the Board or gone on to other areas.
That’s some of the information that you can pick up on the Companies’ Information on Biznews. It really is a treasure chest and whenever you want to go back home, it’s quite simple. You just click on the home key and there we are. I hope this has helped you and I encourage you to go and play a little bit more. This is wonderful information for you that we provide.
