FactSet grows workforce by 400 in quarter
There have been few idle moments at FactSet”™s headquarters in Norwalk, as the financial information company has continued to grow in the aftermath of the recession.
FactSet Research Systems Inc. added more than 400 more employees to its payroll this summer, giving it more than 4,100 as of Aug. 31 when its fiscal year ended. In the fiscal year it increased its headcount 39 percent, even as economic and regulatory uncertainty continues to beset the financial markets that its software tracks and analyzes.
In its fourth fiscal quarter ending Aug. 31, FactSet revenue rose 8 percent from a year earlier to $168 million, and the company earned a $39 million profit. For the full fiscal year, sales were up 3 percent to $641 million, and earnings totaled $150 million.
Between early July and mid-September, FactSet shares surged more than 25 percent to above $84, before fading slightly in the waning days of September.
FactSet has about 500 workers today in Norwalk, and lists nearly 30 more openings. The company was one of just two in Fairfield County to make Fortune magazine”™s list of the 100 best companies to work for in 2010, along with Stew Leonard”™s Market Inc. In the Northeast, FactSet also has offices in New York City, Boston, and Newark, N.J., the latter the home of FactSet”™s “SharkRepellent” product that tracks corporate takeover attempts and defense measures.
FactSet has been acquisitive itself of late, buying Boston-based Market Metrics Inc. in June; but the company has grown primarily through new hires, including some workers in India brought on board as formal employees who had been working previously for the company as outside contractors.
An investment in the future
In a conference call with investment analysts, FactSet CEO Philip Hadley said the bulk of the company”™s new hires are generating content for its feeds, many of them at offshore locations in India. But the company has also been ramping up its sales, consulting and engineering staff this summer, many of them in the United States.
“It”™s really primarily an investment in the future,” Hadley said. “All those people you put in and train ”“ it takes time for them to come up and become productive. But we feel very confident that the investment we”™re making will put us in a stronger competitive position as we move forward.”
Those competitors include Thomson Reuters, based in New York City and with a large presence in Stamford, which in 2008 sold a copy of its Thomson Fundamentals database to FactSet; Bedford, Mass.-based Interactive Data, which last month named as CEO former Thomson Financial CEO Mason Slaine; and Capital IQ, a unit of the McGraw-Hill Cos. that last month spent $300 million to acquire TheMarkets.com, which several banks including UBS AG formed in 2000 to provide research to institutional investors.
Gaining market share
Earlier this year, FactSet executives attributed part of the company”™s growth to gains in market share at the expense of another big-name competitor, New York City-based Bloomberg L.P., whose product set like that of Thomson Reuters is vastly larger with a news bureau and other features ”“ including software that advises fantasy football aficionados which NFL players they should start each week, based on a risk-reward index worked out by Bloomberg programmers.
As the financial industry readies for the kickoff of a new business cycle, FactSet is working to improve its range of offerings in an attempt to better compete, both with giants like Bloomberg and niche competitors ”“ including fixed-income investment managers, an area of renewed focus for FactSet.
“Outside of our client base, we feel we have a large number of prospects,” said Michael Frankenfield, executive vice president and director of global sales for FactSet. “There are literally thousands of investment managers around the world that are potential candidates for FactSet. Our fixed-income offerings have opened up a whole new set of clients. ”¦ We feel we”™re in the early stages.”