Before Gale relaunched Business & Company Resource Center as Business Insights: Essentials last year, you could look up a company and see the company’s lines of business classified by SIC and NAICS. It looks like the new Business Insights: Essentials Platform now only features NAICS classification:
I noticed this when a student was in chat yesterday asking for “Business & Company Resource Center” (as directed by the student’s professor) to look up SIC codes for a company. I mentioned the change to NAICS only classification and also pointed the student to Mergent Online, where you companies are classified with both NAICS and SIC:
Some background – the federal government deprecated the SIC code system when it released NAICS codes in 1997. Some database vendors, as well as the SEC, continue to use SIC for legacy reasons – many old filings and reports were categorized using SIC and they haven’t invested the resources to reclassify the documents. The SIC codes haven’t been updated since 1987 and reflect an industrial economy that no longer exists. NAICS codes were designed for a post-industrial economy and are updated every 5 years.
Thanks for the background. I too tried to explain to the student (so he/she could get back to the professor) that SICs classification has been mostly superseded by NAICS. I also suggested the professor be notified that Business & Company Resource Center is now known as Business Insights: Essentials (a non-felicitous name if ever there was one).