The curve nobody drew

The budget arrives in the first working week of the year with a shape already inside it.

Not one number for the year. Twelve, one per month, and they are not equal. January and February are light. September is heavy. November is the largest single month. The first quarter has been given something like a fifth of the year.

Ask who chose that shape and nobody can tell you. Finance says it came from marketing. Marketing says it came down with the envelope. What usually happened is that it came out of last year's file, and last year's came out of the one before, and if you follow it back far enough you reach a curve drawn for a country where January is the soft month after Christmas, the consumer is tired, short of money and waiting on a credit card statement.

That is a real curve. It is not this market's curve.

Here the first quarter is the best stretch of weather in the year. Riyadh's season has been running since October and does not stop for a change of calendar. The terraces are full and the price of attention is high because everybody is out. Behind that sits Ramadan, expected around the start of March depending on the sighting, which makes February the run-up: media locked, production finished, the shelf loaded. Two of the loudest demand events of the year sit inside the quarter the template calls quiet.

So the money is thinnest where the market is loudest, and heaviest in a September that has to be worked for.

Nobody argues about phasing. The argument in the room is always the total, because the total is what a person can be seen to have won. The split goes through untouched because it looks like arithmetic rather than a decision.

The total is what gets negotiated. The phasing is what gets executed.