Introduction
Our database holds 489,536 companies. This is not a purchased list; it was compiled over months from public sources and is continuously reconciled.
Because we keep getting asked what is actually in it, here is the analysis.
Where these companies are based
| Country | Companies |
|---|---|
| Germany | 378,322 |
| Switzerland | 14,168 |
| Austria | 5,165 |
| United States | 22,122 |
| United Kingdom | 9,165 |
| France | 3,149 |
| Netherlands | 2,329 |
The German-speaking region forms the core with 397,655 companies. The companies outside it mostly got in because they appeared in German-language sources, for example as a parent company or as the applicant of a patent.
What we know about them
| Attribute | available | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Industry assigned | 474,450 | 96.9 % |
| Country known | 455,934 | 93.1 % |
| Website | 463,612 | 94.7 % |
| LinkedIn company page | 297,102 | 60.7 % |
The LinkedIn mapping is the hardest row. It requires us to match a company unambiguously to a company page, and with companies sharing the same name that is not trivial. A wrong mapping costs more than a missing one, so when in doubt we leave the field empty.
Good company data differs from bad company data in whether it guesses or leaves things out when in doubt.
How the data is distributed across industries
| Industry | Companies |
|---|---|
| Professional Services | 91,842 |
| IT Services | 38,830 |
| Industry & Manufacturing | 37,002 |
| Healthcare & Life Sciences | 35,845 |
| Software & Technology | 33,516 |
| Retail & E-Commerce | 28,893 |
| Financial Services | 24,259 |
| Non-Profit & NGO | 23,863 |
| Construction & Engineering | 22,960 |
| Media & Entertainment | 21,713 |
| Hospitality | 20,764 |
| Energy & Utilities | 17,983 |
This roughly mirrors the German economy, with an overweight in services and IT. That comes from these industries communicating more publicly.
The part that is rarely talked about
Besides master data, we keep attributes that we derive from evidence. The largest block is software products in use:
| Attribute | verified cases |
|---|---|
| Software in use | 59,956 |
| Benefits offered | 5,195 |
59,956 verified technology deployments means: in almost 60,000 cases we know that a specific company uses a specific system, and we have the source for it.
Where this comes from: mostly job postings. Anyone looking for a specialist with experience in a particular system is running that system. That is evidence, not a guess.
For sales, this is the most interesting information there is. If you know which system runs at the target customer, you know whether your product fits at all, and you can build your outreach around it.
What an attribute means and what it does not
An important distinction: we record "uses" and we do not record "does not use". Absence cannot be proven from a job posting. If a company carries no attribute with us, it means we found no evidence, not that it does not use the system.
That sounds like hair-splitting, and it is the difference between a fact and an assumption.
Next steps
We are working on getting the LinkedIn mapping above 60 percent and on opening up further attributes from tenders and annual reports.
Goal
We want to be able to say, for every company in the German-speaking region, what it uses and how we know. Happy selling, Axel