The company’s primary area of business.
Benefit
This field provides an easy way to search for stocks within a certain area of business. When making comparisons among stocks, it can be helpful to compare companies within the same area of business. Morningstar also provides percentile rankings within the company’s industry for data such as net margin, revenue growth, earnings growth, and total return.
Note: The total returns for industry averages are capitalization-weighted.
Origin
The information is gathered from the description-of business section of the company’s 10-K form. Morningstar then determines the industry to which the company belongs.