Quandl Taps DataYes for Chinese Fundamental Data

Quandl will this week add fundamental data on 2,500 listed companies, including as-reported and most recent data from income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements collected from official sources in China, provided via DataYes, which will update the databases on a daily basis.

By the end of February, Quandl will also add earnings estimates for Chinese companies, Chinese bond and fund prices, and Chinese macroeconomic indicators to the portal. Later this year, the vendor will also roll out additional databases from DataYes, including sales volumes of Chinese companies on e-commerce websites, and Chinese news and social media sentiment analysis.

In keeping with Quandl's pay-as-you-go distribution model, individual users will be able to access the data for $50 per month; companies will be charged $600 per month for enterprise access; and software developers will be charged $1,000 per month to incorporate the data into their applications and redistribute it to their users.

In addition, Quandl now offers a "speculative developer" license to enable startup software developers who do not necessarily have any paying customers to use and redistribute the data at a reduced cost, on the understanding that when the software developer's revenues hit a certain threshold, the fees will rise to the standard amount.

"The data we are starting with is classic, textbook fundamentals, such as balance sheets and income statements. We received requests from users to be able to get this data in a coherent, organized way, as it isn't that easy to do," says Quandl founder and chief executive Tammer Kamel. "In the US, this stuff is filed in a machine-readable way, but that is not the case in China."

The dataset is in high demand from hedge funds─typically those that invest in China, which require the data to inform their investment research and analysis─though the data may also be of use to banks, mutual funds and economists.

"This data is an advantage for anybody executing investment strategies in China for economic analysis of the market. Data this accurate and quality-controlled is not readily available.... I expect to see a lot of professional institutional demand for the data," he adds.

Around the same time that Quandl was being approached by hedge fund customers requesting Chinese data, DataYes happened to reach out to the vendor as it was seeking a distribution partner for its data outside China, says Vincent Zhang, business development manager at DataYes.

"We considered many different options, and we talked to different companies in North America, but we believe Quandl is the best strategic partner. It has a good reputation and the platform is really user friendly," Zhang adds.