So basic it’s worthless to investors. Often, when I read about a company/corporation I would like to know three things about its finances, just to get a very simple picture of where it stands (only out of curiosity). These are the value of its sales, its net profit after tax, its share price - all of which have extra meaning in a graph covering recent years. That’s all. Oh, and the same information about its major competitors, all in the same webpage. Yahoo financials can be a bit of use but its hard for me to get to that information and, for so many companies, I don’t know which of the many symbol-lookup company names is the parent. Because it is only passing curiosity that motivates me I want to spent the minimum time and effort to find out.
Nobody can do all of the work for you because you are looking for a customized yet detailed view of things. If you actually want to invest, you are going to have to spend sometime yourself going through some things that might seem dry but that is part of it. Each company’s annual or quarterly reports will have all of the information you described but in long form. Many of them are available on the web. You can google X annual report to find them.
Sorry, I was not clear enough. I don’t want to invest. I just want to find a basic picture of how big or small the company is, and how that has changed in recent years, and if that comes with a similar comparison wih its major competitors, that’s a bonus. As I said, it’s just out of curiosity.
Eh, I think you’re asking for information that, if it exists, doesn’t exist for free. 
If I’m correct, you want to type in, say, the symbol for Exxon-Mobil (XOM), and then not only have XOM financials be displayed, but also competitor data, industry data, and historical data charted automatically? (I.e, just by typing in XOM you’d get Chevron, ConocoPhillips, etc financials without asking, then averages for the industry as a whole, and then have this data charted?)
Plenty of places will provide the basic data you want about any single company, but I don’t know of any free service that will go to the effort of also putting competitor and industry data all on the same page, just by asking for one company.
The basic data I want about any single company would do. What are these places? The ones I have found give lots of data I don’t understand and don’t want to try to understand. The reason I asked the question is because, out of a mere passing whim, I would like to find out how big the company is in dollars, and quickly.
Sales, profit and share price, and how they have changed in say, 5 years, that’s all.
Having an idea how it compares with competitors would be interesting but I am not insisting.
The other thing is knowing what is the actual company and what is the subsiduary. With Yahoo Financials I often can’t tell which corporation is the parent - the symbol-name link is not usually as obvious a XOM, so I don’t know if I am looking at data for for the company I read about or an obscure subsiduary.
I just tried this, using Yahoo Finance, and it seems easy enough.
Go to Yahoo Finance.
Click on Symbol Lookup.
Enter the company name; Exxon, in this case, which will return a link to the XOM symbol.
Click on XOM. You’ll see share price on this page. Click on the 5y link to see a chart of the share price for the past five years, or click on Key Statistics to see revenues and gross profits.
Actually, I do know where you can get that data for pretty cheap: The Fortune 500. They categorize the 500 by industry, including industry averages.
It won’t have the latest stock prices, but the other financials will be there.