Guide · The earnings graph
Supplier links
A supplier link means a company named another as a major customer in its annual report (10-K). It is a lower bound, because many companies describe big customers without naming them.
Where the links come from
US accounting rules require a company to disclose when a single customer brings in 10% or more of its revenue. Many companies go further and name the customer, and some tag the name in the machine-readable (inline XBRL) part of their 10-K, on a dimension called MajorCustomersAxis.
The lab reads that tag from every 10-K filed by NYSE and Nasdaq companies over the last three years, and matches each named customer to a listed company. A match becomes a link: the filer supplies the customer.
When a link holds
A link holds from the day its 10-K was filed until the company's next 10-K (or 15 months, if none follows). If a later 10-K stops naming the customer, the link stops there, and a gap is left as a gap: the page does not draw a link on days no filing asserted it.
Why it is a lower bound
- Many companies anonymise their customers ("Customer A").
- Some name customers only in the text of the report, which the lab does not read for this.
- A name can fail to match its listed company, for example a subsidiary or a former name.
So a missing line is not evidence that two companies are unrelated.
What the links show
Disclosure usually runs from a small supplier to a big customer, because the customer is a big share of the supplier's revenue but not the other way round. A few large customers, such as big retailers and drug wholesalers, are named by many suppliers.
These links are what an earnings read-through travels along. On the graph they are amber lines; see dependency strength for how to read their brightness.