What the distributor still holds

Every April a distributor's warehouse in Cairo is still full of March.

The pallets are the ones with the month printed on them. The family pack in the decorated sleeve. The juice multipacks bought to stand on a table for twelve. The date boxes with a handle on the lid. All of it left the brand's warehouse in February, invoiced and counted, and the report that followed called it a record month.

Some of it never reached a shelf. Some reached one and came back.

That stock carries a problem the everyday pack does not have. It cannot wait for demand, because the demand it was made for happens once a year and has been and gone. A printed carton does not quietly become an ordinary carton in May. It gets discounted to move, sat on until it is old, or sent back if the distributor's terms allow.

So the April order is small, for a reason nobody in the marketing team can see from an office in Cairo. The shelf is still eating March.

The report will call April soft and reach for the usual explanations. A post-occasion dip. A tired consumer. The currency.

What it hides is that the brand is competing with its own goods, at a price it does not set, in a warehouse it does not own.

And the man who owns that warehouse is doing the arithmetic that decides things. Not the sell-in, which is the brand's number and was settled in February. What is left on his floor this month, which is his. That figure is what he brings to December, when next year's terms are put in front of him, and what he is still holding is his opening position.

Sell-in decided how good the month looked. April decides how much of next year the brand is allowed to have.