The three organizations have joined forces on a pilot program to showcase XBRL's ability to provide companies with an easier means to communicate financial information and deliver it to investors with enhanced capability to analyze data. The pilot program, designed by PwC and stored on Nasdaq hardware, provides access to XBRL data through Microsoft Office. It is available to the public at http://www.nasdaq.com/xbrl.
Nasdaq, a key driver of capital formation, is the first stock market to recognize the value of XBRL. "Nasdaq is committed to increasing transparency for investors, which ultimately will help restore investor trust in the quality and integrity of the information that fuels the markets," said Alfred Berkeley, vice chairman of Nasdaq. "The widespread adoption of XBRL technology will mean corporations and investors alike will reap the benefits of a simpler process for issuing financial reports and making investment decisions."
Based on Extensible Markup Language or XML, the universal format for data on the Web, XBRL streamlines the way companies report and publish their financial data, and how analysts and investors can review that information. For example, before XBRL, investors would need to pore through numerous reports and precisely program their computers to recognize any given value from a financial statement. With XBRL, data is tagged to instruct the system how to handle the data in question and enables the user to locate the necessary information without leafing through multiple financial reports.
XBRL was founded by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants to benefit the entire business reporting supply chain, including CPAs, by improving access to financial information and decreasing costs associated with the distribution of financial information. The pilot program will provide investors with remote access to financial data from the financial reports of 21 Nasdaq-listed companies starting with a company's most recent financials and going back five years. The data, which will be formatted in XBRL and will be publicly available via a Nasdaq-hosted Web Service, will showcase XBRL's ability to allow for easy comparisons of the financials of companies within a particular industry, like semiconductors. This data is accessible through the familiar interface of Microsoft® Excel via a custom solution built by Dell Professional Services. It does not require investors/analysts to manually retrieve the data from individual financial documents.
"The challenge in the financial industry is enabling information workers to analyze industry data in a timely fashion and gain competitive advantage for their organizations," said Jeff Raikes, group vice president, Productivity and Business Services, Microsoft. "Our teamwork with Nasdaq and PwC will enable easy access and analysis of this XBRL information using Microsoft Excel."
According to Mike Willis, Founding Chairman of XBRL International, a non-profit industry consortium, and a Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, "By reducing the time and cost of obtaining and using information, XBRL will greatly enhance the ability of companies and investors to produce and analyze information. This pilot demonstrates the advantages of using technology to transform the corporate reporting supply chain for the benefit of all participants. XBRL will lead to improved investor access and dramatically increase the speed at which investors can obtain information for their own analysis."
Financial information from the following Nasdaq-listed companies has been included in this pilot: Intel Corporation; Maxim Integrated Products, Inc.; Xilinx, Inc.; Linear Technology Corp.; Broadcom Corp.; NVIDIA Corp.; Altera Corp.; Microchip Technology, Inc.; Marvel Technology Group, Ltd.; QLogic Corp.; Atmel Corp.; Intersil Corp.; Integrated Device Technology, Inc.; Conexant Systems, Inc.; RF Micro Devices, Inc.; Applied Micro Circuits, Corp.; Semtech Corp.; Lattice Semiconductor Corp.; Micrel, Inc.; Vitesse Semiconductor Corp.; and Microsoft Corporation. Nasdaq will be actively recruiting Nasdaq-listed companies to participate in the pilot program in the future.
Nasdaq is the world's largest stock market. With nearly 4,000 companies, Nasdaq lists more companies and trades more shares per day than any other U.S. market. Over the past five years, Nasdaq has outpaced all other U.S. markets in listing IPOs. It is also home to category-defining companies that are leaders across all areas of business including technology, retail, communications, financial services, media and biotechnology industries. With operations on three continents, Nasdaq is a key driver of global capital formation.
For more information about The Nasdaq Stock Market, visit the Nasdaq Web site at http://www.nasdaq.com or the Nasdaq NewsroomSM at http://www.nasdaqnews.com.
