Here is a high-level discussion:

https://piefed.social/comment/9903594

But going beyond that, forgot about Ukraine for a second.

Let’s say you are a competitor of Ubiquiti and you want to develop a bonus structure for your regional teams. You want to know the return on your marketing spend, how well the regional sales teams are developing relationships with retailers, B2B and other source of revenues.

To do that you need to know your real market share. You know your own numbers, but if share is a component of your bonus structure, you need to have accurate numbers for your competition (your sales going up by 15% is a massive failure if the rest of the regional market truly grew by 30%, it means your teams are failing).

To do that, you have several source of data. Roughly speaking you have two basic measures ([1], [2]):

• [1] Shipments into a region/channel. Units that were sent to a geography (not sales, just shipments)
• [2] POS transactions (syndicated providers offer this albeit it’s less comprehensive on a global geography basis than [1])
• [3] You’re going to always have a delta between the two measures ([1], [2]) above, because you have things like B2B sales, government sales, shipments into the regional distributor channel and so on. These numbers are also available on a regional basis from market data providers.

That being said, you have situations where ([1] - [2]) clearly does not equal anything close to even the highest estimates of [3]. That’s when you know shipments into a region are actually being diverted into another country (other countries?).

If the difference between ([1] - [2]) and [3] for your competitor is huge, you want adjust this in your regional market share calculations and bonus payouts. Because otherwise your regional team might be busting ass like no tomorrow and their performance is being undercounted because your competitor is not actually selling a large part of [1] in the given region, the units are going elsewhere.

Believe it or not, this can be a very sensitive topic. People tend to get very pissed off if their bonuses are impacted (especially if they work hard to grow their regional business).

And that’s if you don’t have access to Ubiquiti datasets; our thought experiment positions us as a company that is trying understand shipment to POS/sales transactions for our competitor; Ubiquiti.

If you are Ubiquiti, I assume (this was true in tech product segments where I have worked) you also have the benefit of being able to track geographic activation of your products (I am assuming it’s possible to update Ubiquiti devices?) and potentially their serial numbers; so you can track which shipments are being diverted to which geography. With some more work and tracking, you can figure out what’s going.

There are some other approaches to triangulation that are used that I am not going to cover here (assuming you are a competitor of Ubiquiti).

Do you see why I said what I did?