Gain.pro: Market research across companies in the NORCEE

Sidharth was working on a set of Nordic companies at Gain.pro when he noticed an unusual pattern: several salmon companies had seen a sharp revenue dip followed by a strong recovery within a couple of years. The movement was sharp enough to warrant a closer look.

His first instinct was to check whether the uptick was sector-wide or company-specific. He cross-referenced multiple companies in the same space and quickly ran into a complication: many of the companies that sold salmon derived only a fraction of their revenue from it, making the signal noisy. The pure-play salmon producers were largely privately held, which made their financials harder to access.

He worked through that constraint by focusing on the subset of companies where salmon represented close to all of their revenue. Once he had a clean sample, he turned to commodity pricing data. Finding reliable per-kilogram price trend data required identifying the right platforms, which took iteration.

What he found was a disease outbreak in the aquaculture supply chain that had caused a significant shortage of edible salmon. The shortage had driven prices up sharply, inflating revenue for producers in the short term. At the same time, demand from high-end restaurants and everyday consumers was rising, compounding the effect.

He compiled his findings into a research report and shared it with the team and the European research group. The output changed how the team read those companies: what had looked like organic growth was an externally driven spike. The insight fed directly into the assessment section for those companies, where the team noted that a disease event could both inflate short-term revenue and create significant operational bottlenecks over time.