Answer to practice exercise

Find information about Applied Materials, Inc., in Santa Clara, California. What is its ticker symbol? Who is its CEO? What was its net income for the most recent fiscal year?

The kind of information we're looking for sounds like it would be in "company dossier," so that would be the first place to search, once you get into LexisNexis business information.

If you search by the name of the company, Applied Materials, you get a list of several companies. Based on their names and addresses, the first one is the one you want. From its dossier, you can indeed get the answers to the above questions:

• Ticker symbol: AMAT
• CEO: Michael R. (Mike) Splinter
• Net income, FY 2006: $1,516,700,000