Industry codes are assigned to standardised employer names through manual research conducted by a Lightcast analyst. When a company is involved in more than a single industry, industry classification is assigned based on the company’s highest employee head count.

We have experimented with a few different methods of assigning industry codes (SSIC) to companies across the life of our Singapore dataset, including self-reported industry classification and the ACRA database/tax records. Limitations were identified with the SSIC classification of companies using the ACRA database as many companies were reporting as holding companies or other finance industry codes, irrespective of the industry sector in which they operate in. For example Japan Food Holding using the ACRA database mapping is in the financial industry; Lightcast in contrast associates this company with the Restaurant industry.