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How to read your Concentrate results

When a scenario has run, the right-hand side of the Scenarios page holds its results: Overview for every market at once, and Selected market for one market in detail. Set your own risk thresholds and Sloc colours and filters the markets by them, so you can go straight to the ones that matter.

The Overview

Every market in the subset gets a card, grouped by geography. The controls above them change what you're looking at:

  • Geography / Product - group the cards by geographic market or by product market.

  • The filter - show all markets, or only those in one risk band.

  • Search markets - find a market by name.

The Overview tab with market cards grouped by geography, and the view controls highlighted

Each card carries the three headline figures for that market, each with its change:

  • Combined share - the parties' share after the merger, and the increment the merger adds.

  • Combined rank - where the merged entity would rank, and how far it moves up.

  • HHI score - concentration after the merger, and the delta.

A market card, with the risk dot and the coloured bar on each figure

Once you've set thresholds, each figure gets a coloured bar for the band it falls in, and the dot beside the market name takes the highest of them - so a market can be amber on concentration and still rate red overall on share. Click any card to open that market in full.

Setting your risk thresholds

In Metrics & risk on the right, tick a metric to rate markets by it. Each metric you tick gets:

  • A Low / Medium / High slider. Drag the handles or type into the boxes to set where each band starts - 25% and 40% combined share, say, or the HHI levels in the guidance you're working to.

  • A delta threshold. Markets where the merger adds less than this are set aside as Low delta, however high the combined figure is, so a market the parties already led doesn't come out as a problem on its own.

The Metrics and risk panel with combined share and HHI rated, and their thresholds

HHI starts at the levels most guidance uses - 1,800 and 3,000, with a delta of 100 - and combined share starts at 25% and 40%; change them to whatever the case calls for. Add metric brings in overall concentration measures - firm-count and the top-1 to top-5 shares - which rate the market itself rather than the parties.

The filter then counts the markets in each band, so you can jump to the high-risk ones and park the rest. No overlap holds the markets where only one party is present, or neither.

The filter showing how many markets fall into each risk band
One market in detail

The Selected market tab shows a single market, with its geographic hierarchy on the left and its product hierarchy on the right - each with risk dots, so you can see how the market you're in sits among its neighbours and move between them in a click. The headline figures and the market's risk rating sit across the top.

The Selected market tab, with the geographic and product trees either side of one market

Market shares shows every competitor's share of the market and the market size in the middle. Top competitors ranks them after the merger, with the merged entity's bar split into the parties' own shares so you can see the increment, and arrows showing how the other competitors' ranks change. The source line underneath names where that market's figures came from.

Top competitors, with the merged entity's two parts shown in its bar
Markets that come with background on the industry

Some markets carry more than figures. Where a market's data came from Sloc's built-in IBISWorld reports, a Competitive forces section appears under the chart, with the report's read on the industry: concentration, competition, barriers to entry, substitutes, buyer power and supplier power, each rated and marked as increasing, steady or decreasing. Open a force to read the reasoning behind the rating and the evidence it rests on.

Underneath, Top company details does the same for the market's larger players. Pick a company from the dropdown on the right and you get its industry revenue, size by headcount and where it's based; Performance analysis opens the report's write-up on how that company is trading and what's behind it.

Competitive forces, Top company details and the Performance analysis write-up on a market whose data came from a built-in report (the write-up text is blurred here)

It's there for the markets Sloc has a report for, and only those - look at the Sources for this market line just above it. A market you uploaded, filled in yourself or gathered through an RFI shows your sources and no competitive forces, which is why you may see it on some markets in a scenario and not others.

Treat it as background for framing the market and the questions to ask, not as evidence in itself: it's a published view of the industry as a whole, not an assessment of your transaction.

Pro tips

  • Set the thresholds before you read the markets. They're what turns 96 markets into the handful worth arguing about.

  • Switch the grouping to Product to see whether a problem follows a product line across countries or sits in one country.

  • Thresholds are saved with the scenario, so a colleague opening it sees the markets rated the same way you did.

  • The download icon at the top right exports the results for the annex.