Chinese XBRL Data On the Way

By Maria Trombly | Securities Industry News | January 25, 2006

Supporting the Chinese markets' push into the automated future, Edgar Online said it will be the first U.S. financial information company to deliver fundamental data on Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) and Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) issues in extensible business reporting language (XBRL) format.

The exchanges require their listed companies to report their data in XBRL, which enables investors regardless of technology platform to drill down into financial reports, make charts and comparisons and track historical data faster and more comprehensively than with older, manual methods. South Norwalk, Conn.-based Edgar Online, an avid promoter of the standard, announced the deal on Jan. 18.

XBRL has gradually been gaining momentum since its launch in 1999; many exchanges and regulators are moving to adopt it, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under chairman Christopher Cox is vocally advocating wider acceptance.

Edgar Online said that through relationships with information processing subsidiaries of SSE and SZSE, it expects to make the Chinese corporate data available to clients of its I-Metrix XBRL-based products in the first half of 2006. It will include current financial filings of all Chinese companies trading on the two exchanges as well as five years of historical data.

Additional coverage of Edgar Online's XBRL-format Chinese exchange data--and of XBRL adoption in China and the U.S.--will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Securities Industry News.