A simple example
Imagine a country supplied €10m into a €100m market last year: a 10% share. This year its sales fall to €9m, but the market falls to €75m. Its share rises to 12% despite losing €1m of trade.
Calling that supplier a growth winner would be misleading. It gained competitive position inside a contracting market.
Four different stories
- Value up and share up: expansion and competitive gain.
- Value up and share down: growth, but slower than the market.
- Value down and share up: contraction, but relative resilience.
- Value down and share down: absolute and competitive decline.
A live example from the United States
US Chapter 92 imports in the latest trailing 12 months were $1.244bn, down 18.1% from $1.519bn. Imports from Indonesia fell too—from $228.3m to $204.3m—but Indonesia’s share rose from 15.0% to 16.4%. It lost nearly $24m of trade while gaining 1.4 percentage points of share.
Mexico tells a different story. Its value rose by $8.2m to $129.1m and its share increased by 2.4 percentage points to 10.4%. China experienced both absolute and relative decline: value fell by $163.2m to $360.5m and share dropped by 5.5 percentage points to 29.0%.
Three conclusions, not one leaderboard
Indonesia was relatively resilient, Mexico made an absolute gain and China accounted for most of the market’s lost value. A table ranked only by share movement would flatter Indonesia; one ranked by percentage growth might elevate a much smaller supplier; one ranked only by current value would conceal Mexico’s advance.
The better design lets leaders move deliberately between scale, absolute movement and share. It also shows the market total above the partners, because every share movement is conditional on what happened to the denominator.
How the interface should rank
Share should rank by current share. Value Increase should rank by absolute increase, not percentage growth. Up should rank the largest positive value change; Down the largest negative value change.
Percentage growth still helps spot emerging suppliers, but it needs a minimum-value threshold or small-base warning. Otherwise one unusual shipment can dominate the list.
Why it matters
Absolute value shows where money moved. Share change shows who captured position. Percentage change highlights emerging movements after scale is considered. The donut shows composition; the adjacent table must supply the context it cannot.
Sources and scope
This analysis uses official aggregate trade and policy sources. It does not represent retailer sell-through or company-level shipment intelligence. External commentary is labelled separately from official evidence.