Market Research using the Company Register

As a product manager or product owner, one of your major concerns is the size of the market (or the size of your competition), but did you know that there is a rather simple way to take a first stab at those numbers? Lets explore that.

Should a product manager do market research?

Company registery data

Lets first take a look at what a company register is. A company register is an official database that records essential information about businesses, such as their legal name, registration number, and details of directors and shareholders. Maintained by a government or authorized body, it ensures transparency, legal compliance, and provides a reliable source of information for investors, creditors, and the public.

Examples of company registers within the EU include:

1. Companies House (UK) — Maintains records of companies in the United Kingdom.
2. Handelsregister (Germany) — The commercial register for businesses in Germany.
3. Registro Mercantil Central (Spain) — The central commercial registry for Spanish companies.
4. Registro delle Imprese (Italy) — The Italian business register.
5. Registre du Commerce et des Sociétés (France) — The French register of commerce and companies.
6. Kamer van Koophandel (Netherlands) — The Dutch Chamber of Commerce, which maintains the trade register.
7. Kruispuntbank van Ondernemingen (Belgium) — The Crossroads Bank for Enterprises, which manages the Belgian business register.

Most of them offer one or more ways to download the register in an anonymised fashion so that you can do your magic. Germany for example has this site: Offene Registeroffeneregister.de https://offeneregister.de and the Netherlands has https://www.kvk.nl/producten-bestellen/kvk-handelsregister-open-data-set/

There is also https://api.opencorporates.com/documentation/API-Reference which appears to missing the branch data for many entries are more targeted towards journalism who want to track people rather than activitities, but I might be wrong.

Reading the data

Reading the data is not that hard, but not trivial either. The sheer size means that the product managers Swiss army knife: excel just is not going to cut it. Here’s a few lines of python that will do the trick:

import pandas as pd

data = pd.read_csv("~/Downloads/kvk-open-data-set-handelsregister.csv", encoding='iso-8859-1')
df = pd.DataFrame(data)

Basically we are reading the data from the comma separated file and telling it what character set the KVK is using, and turning it into a dataframe, which is a handy construct for querying the data.

SBI codes

Most company registers have made an attempt to classify the companies activites, with the KVK they are using SBI codes. Let’s say you have an idea that would revolutionise the world of driving schools, the SBI code for that is 8553. So the current market size is:

matches = df.loc[df['Hoofdactiviteit'] == 8553]
print(str(len(matches)))

matches is a list of all entries that have the ‘Hoofdactiviteit’ (main activity) set to 8553. There is also secondary activity that we could test for. Rather than a deep analysis we just print the number of matches, which in case you are wondering is 9617.

Why should I learn to code?

Because in 5 lines you learned something that was guesswork beforehand. Of course your development team can do a better job and more detailed analysis, but let’s not bother them with the basics. In a few minutes you can get up to date answers based on real data.

What’s next?

Well, there is geographical data, pointing to the area where you may find the most customers. There is data regarding the age of the company, the legal form. Gathering market data is not hard, just start!