Journal
Supplier concentration when three names hold half the year
How to tell a genuine specialist from a spelling triplet, and why a long tail of one-off vendors is not automatically healthier than a tight top five.
Concentration is not a moral score. A hospital that buys a named reagent from one licensed importer is concentrated for a reason. A construction firm that thinks it has forty fuel vendors and actually has two, plus a lot of spelling, is concentrated by accident.
Join, then look
Count after joining. Before that, every map lies. Tax numbers help. So do addresses on invoices. A Kutaisi yard and a Tbilisi registered office may still be one buying relationship. The public company register in Georgia is enough, in many cases, to see a parent and a branch. We stop where the public record stops. Guessing at hidden ownership is a different profession.
The tail is a story too
Hundreds of one-off vendors can mean healthy competition. They can also mean a card, a market stall, and no contract, repeated. The findings note should say which it looks like, with examples, not with a slogan about “fragmentation”.
What a board can actually do
If three joined names hold half the spend, the next question is contractual: is there a framework, a price list, a standby clause? If there is not, the briefing should not pretend the map is the negotiation. It is the picture you take into the negotiation.
That picture is the whole of a supplier concentration study, or one chapter of a full review.