How to Find Companies when SIC Codes are Too Broad

If you’ve ever tried to build a target list using SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) codes, you’ll know the feeling. 

You search for a sector, get back a list of hundreds or thousands of companies, and spend the next few days manually cutting it down to the ones that actually matter. Or you search for a sector that barely existed when the classification system was written, and get almost nothing back.

The UK’s Standard Industrial Classification system was last meaningfully updated in 2007, and the economy has moved on a long way since then. For anyone doing business development, origination, or sector research today, SIC codes are often too broad, too outdated, or both.

This article explains why SIC codes fall short, what that costs teams who rely on them, and how to find the companies you’re actually looking for, including a walkthrough of how Beauhurst’s live industry classification works in practice.

What SIC codes are and why they still get used

A quick recap of SIC 2007

The UK Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system assigns every registered company a code describing its main area of business activity. Companies choose a SIC code, sometimes several, when they incorporate at Companies House, and that code becomes part of the public record. The current version, SIC 2007, groups businesses into sections, divisions, groups, and classes, running from broad categories like ‘Information and Communication’ down to specific activities like ‘62012, business and domestic software development.’

Where SIC codes still add value

The UK Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system assigns every registered company a code describing its main area of business activity. Companies choose a SIC code, sometimes several, when they incorporate at Companies House, and that code becomes part of the public record. The current version, SIC 2007, groups businesses into sections, divisions, groups, and classes, running from broad categories like ‘Information and Communication’ down to specific activities like ‘62012, business and domestic software development.’

Why SIC codes are outdated and too broad

A 2007 taxonomy in a 2026 economy

SIC 2007 is nearly two decades old, and it shows. Entire sectors that are now significant sources of deal flow and investment, such as agritech, generative AI, climate tech, quantum computing, and insurtech, don’t have dedicated codes. And whilst SIC 2026 is just around the corner, the government has not yet mandated the use of these.  

Companies operating in these spaces get scattered across loosely related buckets, or lumped in with businesses that have nothing in common with them beyond a shared four-digit number.

Generic categories bundle very different businesses

Even within long-established sectors, SIC codes group together companies that a human researcher would never put in the same bucket. Code 62012, for instance, covers everything from a consumer mobile app studio to an enterprise SaaS provider to a defence software contractor. 

If you’re trying to build a target list of mid-market enterprise software companies for outreach, a SIC-based search hands you all three, and you’re left working out manually which ones are actually relevant.

The "Other" and "not elsewhere classified" black hole

Every SIC section has a catch-all: ‘Other,’ ‘not elsewhere classified,’ or similar. In practice, these codes absorb a large number of companies, often the innovative, hard-to-categorise businesses that are most interesting to origination and investment teams. Once a company lands in ‘Other,’ it’s effectively invisible to anyone searching by SIC code. You’d need to already know it exists to find it.

Self-selection and stale codes

Companies choose their own SIC code at the point of incorporation, and there’s little incentive to update it later. A business that pivots from consumer app to B2B platform, or from services to product, will often keep the SIC code it registered with years earlier. So SIC data frequently describes what a company was on day one, not what it does now.

Emerging sectors that don't fit anywhere

Fast-moving, cross-disciplinary industries (think climate-adjacent manufacturing, decentralised finance, or synthetic biology) are exactly where SIC classification breaks down, which is a particular problem for anyone whose job is to spot opportunities early.

The business cost of relying on outdated SIC codes

Wasted business development effort

When a SIC-based search returns hundreds of loosely relevant companies, someone has to sort through them. That usually means manual filtering, cross-referencing against LinkedIn, scanning company websites, applying gut instinct, before a list is even ready for outreach. It’s slow, hard to repeat consistently, and easy to get wrong.

Weak Ideal Customer Profiles

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is only as good as the data used to build it. If the underlying company set is defined by an overly broad or outdated SIC code, the resulting ICP ends up fuzzy at the edges, mixing in companies that don’t really fit the pattern the business is targeting, and missing others that do.

Missed origination and investment opportunities

For corporate finance and investment teams, this is the highest-stakes version of the problem. If the most promising companies in an emerging sector are scattered across unrelated SIC codes, or buried in “Other,” they simply won’t surface in a standard search, and a competitor with better data might get there first.

Poor market sizing and sector research

Sector research and market sizing exercises built on SIC data inherit all of its blind spots. A ‘market size’ for an emerging sector that has no dedicated SIC code is, by definition, incomplete, and any conclusions drawn from it will understate the real scale of the opportunity.

How Beauhurst solves the SIC code problem

A live industry classification, not a 2007 snapshot

Beauhurst tracks the UK and German private company landscape continuously, so its classification reflects how companies operate today, not how they described themselves at incorporation. Rather than relying solely on a static code set from 2007, Beauhurst’s research team actively researches and categorises companies as they grow, pivot, and enter new markets.

Custom sector groupings across every UK and German private company

Beauhurst applies its own sector groupings across the full universe of tracked companies, built to reflect how the market actually segments rather than forcing every business into a code designed nearly twenty years ago. That makes it possible to define a sector like fintech or climate tech in a way that matches how the industry itself uses those terms.

Buzzwords that track emerging and cross-sector segments

For niche categories that don’t map neatly onto a single sector, such as generative AI applications in healthcare, Beauhurst uses buzzwords: tags that identify companies operating in a specific emerging theme, regardless of which broader sector they sit in. This is the layer where SIC codes are weakest.

Continuous reclassification as companies evolve

Because Beauhurst’s research is ongoing rather than a one-off exercise, companies get reclassified as their business changes. A company that started as a niche services provider and evolved into a software platform will be recategorised to reflect that, so searches stay accurate over time instead of drifting further from reality the longer a company has been trading.

Layering in signals, financials, and ownership for precise targeting

Sector and buzzword classification is just the starting point. Beauhurst also layers in growth signals, funding history, financials, and ownership data, so a target list isn’t just companies tagged with a given sector. It can be narrowed further by growth stage, funding recency, headcount, and location, producing a list that’s ready for outreach.

Platform demonstration: finding a company and its SIC code on Beauhurst

The steps below walk through how to find a specific company on Beauhurst and see both its SIC code and Beauhurst’s own classification side-by-side.

Step 1: Searching for a company by name on the Beauhurst platform

Start from the main search bar on the Beauhurst platform and enter the company name. The platform surfaces matching companies from across its tracked universe of UK and German private companies, so you can select the correct entity even where similarly named businesses exist.

Step 2: Where to find the SIC code on a Beauhurst company profile

Once you’re on a company’s profile page, its official SIC code sits alongside the core company information, including incorporation details, registered address, and company number. This gives you the standard classification at a glance, exactly as it appears on the public record.

Step 3: Seeing Beauhurst's own sector groupings and buzzwords alongside the SIC code

Directly above the SIC code, the same profile shows Beauhurst’s sector groupings and any relevant buzzwords assigned to the company. This is where the difference becomes clear. A company might carry a broad, generic SIC code, while its Beauhurst sector tags and buzzwords describe what it does and which emerging themes it belongs to.

Step 4: Using Beauhurst's classification to find similar companies at scale

From an individual company profile, you can move into search and filter by the same sector groupings or buzzwords to surface every other company that shares them, across the full tracked universe rather than just the ones that happen to share a SIC code. This is what turns hours of manual list-building into a single filtered search.

Step 5: Building a defensible, repeatable target list beyond SIC codes

From there, additional filters, such as funding stage, financials, location, growth signals, and ownership, can be layered on top to refine the list further. The result is a target list built on classification that reflects how companies actually operate today, that can be explained and defended to colleagues or clients, and that can be rerun on demand as the market changes.

When SIC codes still have a role, and when to move beyond them

SIC codes aren’t going away, and they don’t need to. They remain a useful, free, standardised starting point for broad sector filtering, government reporting, and situations where a rough category is genuinely all that’s needed. 

The issue is treating SIC as sufficient for precise, current, or emerging-sector targeting. That’s where the cracks show, and where teams end up burning time on manual workarounds that a live classification system was built to remove.

Find companies using Beauhurst industries and buzzwords

SIC 2007 wasn’t built for the sectors driving deal flow today. Nearly two decades on, its categories are too broad, too static, and too easily left stale by self-selection to reliably support precise business development, origination, or sector research, particularly in fast-moving or emerging industries. A live classification system that reflects how companies actually operate today, layered with financial and growth data, replaces days of manual filtering with a single filtered search. Search Beauhurst to see how your target sector is classified today.