What looked like a straightforward revenue decline turned into 3 separate profitability problems.
01 – Main Analysis Question
Revenue down 18.7%. Margin unchanged. This is a volume problem, not a business model problem.
Revenue, profit, and units declined at near-identical rates (~18.4%). When three metrics fall in lockstep, costs didn’t spiral and pricing didn’t collapse, the business just sold less. The 29.8% margin holding steady confirms it.
The first question I ask when everything declines uniformly: demand problem, or business model problem? Margin stability says demand. That completely changes where the response effort should go.
02 – Where Revenue Comes From
Sub-Saharan Africa is the top market. North America barely registers.
Drilling into Sub-Saharan Africa: no single dominant country. Burkina Faso leads at just 89.9M, with Guinea-Bissau, Niger, and Congo close behind. The 3bn is genuinely spread across many West African markets.
North America at 235.2M = one-eleventh of Sub-Saharan Africa, in the world’s largest consumer market. Is this market deliberate constraint, or untapped opportunity?
03 – Category Margins
The biggest revenue category has the worst margin. Cosmetics is holding the whole business up.
Office Supplies, which is the #1 revenue category, runs at 19.4% margin, 10 points below the average. Household posted the steepest decline at −24.4%. Cosmetics, third in revenue, carries a 39.8% margin that is keeping the 29.8% average alive.
If Cosmetics slips, either in volume, pricing, or channel mix, the blended margin falls fast. This is the category that needs active protection, not just monitoring.
04 – Channel Analysis
Equal revenue. Half the profit. Online is not the growth story it appears to be.
Same revenue. Same units (19M each). Offline earns double the profit. The faster-declining channel is also the less profitable one. Category mix partly explains it as Cosmetics (39.8% margin) skews offline; Office Supplies (19.4%) likely drives more online volume.
I initially read the near-even channel split as a digital success story. Filtering by channel reversed that entirely. This is exactly why summary data needs to be stress-tested before forming conclusions.
5 – Key Highlights for Decision Makers
Four priorities, in order.
- Protect Cosmetics margin
At 39.8%, it’s the anchor holding the blended average up. The two largest categories both run below average — any Cosmetics slippage hits the whole business. - Diagnose the online margin gap before investing further in digital
A 20-point margin difference between channels of equal revenue isn’t noise. Category mix explains part of it, but fulfilment costs and pricing need to be pulled apart by channel before more is committed. - Watch out for Household category
With 24.4% decline, nearly double the rate of Office Supplies. Whether it’s demand shift, supply gap, or competition changes the response entirely. - Address the growth of North America market
235.2M in the world’s largest market needs a documented reason. Constraint or opportunity, it can’t stay unaddressed.
Technical Showcase
Analytical thinking is half the work. I believe making sure the insight reaches the person who needs to act on it is the other half.
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Conditional KPI badges with directional arrows
Color-coded badges (red/green) driven by a DAX variance measure communicate direction before the viewer reads a number.
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Immediate booking
Each KPI card contains a compact monthly bar chart, surfacing seasonality and recent dips at the summary level without a separate panel.
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Rank-based bar highlighting via DAX
Top bars render in teal; others in muted gray, driven by a DAX rank measure returning the correct hex per bar. Guides the eye without hiding supporting data.
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Field parameters for metric switching
A field parameter lets the viewer toggle the trend chart between Revenue, Profit, and Units Sold on the same axis: one chart, three lenses, no page navigation.