Hi,
I need the ratios Foreign Sales to Total Sales and foreign Assets to Total assets of some S&P 500 companies.
How can I get the foreign Sales / foreign assets data in compustat?

Thanks a lot, your help is greatly appreciated.

Ferdinand

hi Ferdinand,

Compustat Funda has ‘PIFO - Pretax Income - Foreign’. I suppose you can get to foreign sales, foreign assets through the segment disclosures. (Geographical segments, see https://wrds-web.wharton.upenn.edu/wrds//tools/variable.cfm?library_id=129&file_id=77282 )

Best,

Joost

Hi Joost, I have a similar question:

I am calculating foreign sales of multinational firms. What I am doing is to try to add all sales of segments whose segment names are not United States. But I find that there are many null values of segment names in the dataset. I am wondering what I should deal with this null values. Treat them as domestic segments or foreign segments? Or just delete them(But I will lose too many samples)
And I am also wondering if there is any other way to calculate foreign sales of a firm.

Many thx!

Joost Impink - 05 March 2016 08:57 PM

hi Ferdinand,

Compustat Funda has ‘PIFO - Pretax Income - Foreign’. I suppose you can get to foreign sales, foreign assets through the segment disclosures. (Geographical segments, see https://wrds-web.wharton.upenn.edu/wrds//tools/variable.cfm?library_id=129&file_id=77282 )

Best,

Joost

hi,

Yes, the segment disclosures are problematic!

If there is prior research you are following, then follow that. If not, then I would compute various ‘versions’ of it using different assumptions (dropping, not-dropping and assuming 0, etc); choose the most realistic version for your main analyses and report the alternate versions as sensitivity tests/footnotes.

Hope this helps,

Joost