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Form 20-F and 6-K
Also called: 20-F, 6-K, Form 40-F, foreign private issuer, FPI
The annual report (20-F) and current reports (6-K) that foreign private issuers listed in the US file in place of the 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K.
Explanation
A foreign private issuer, roughly a non-US company that is not majority-owned and run from the US, files its annual report on Form 20-F within four months of its fiscal year-end. It may report under IFRS as issued by the IASB without reconciling to US GAAP. Canadian issuers can use Form 40-F instead.
There is no quarterly report requirement. Form 6-K furnishes whatever the company publishes at home or to its other exchanges: results, press releases, offering documents, meeting notices. Many foreign issuers report only half-yearly, and 6-Ks carry no item numbers, so events are harder to scan than on an 8-K.
Foreign private issuers are also exempt from the US proxy rules and from Section 16, so their insiders do not file Form 4. Many trade as American depositary shares (ADSs), where one ADS can represent several ordinary shares or a fraction of one.
Why it matters
Expect less frequent data and different signals: a half-year balance sheet can be months older than a US company’s, and a listing deficiency may surface only in a 6-K press release.
How Equity Dictionary measures it
IFRS filers are normalized from the ifrs-full taxonomy. For semi-annual reporters, burn is the latest half-year divided by two, and runway is not scored from a balance sheet more than 10 months old. Listing notices furnished on 6-K are not itemized, so they may be missed (the score notes this), and share-based measures keep the XBRL share count because quotes count ADSs.
Related terms
- Form 10-K and 10-Q: The annual (10-K) and quarterly (10-Q) reports US public companies file with the SEC, containing their financial statements and management’s discussion.
- Form 8-K: The current report a company must file within four business days of a major event, organized into numbered items.
- XBRL: The machine-readable tags SEC filers attach to every number in their financial statements, so software can read financials without parsing documents.
- Form 4: The filing in which a company’s officers, directors and 10%-plus shareholders report their trades in its stock, due within two business days.
- Burn rate: How fast a company uses up cash, usually measured as operating cash outflow per quarter or per month.
Plain-English summary for research; not legal or investment advice.