Food, Beverage and Cosmetics Sub-industries through Inventory Composition
Nature: exploratory analysis (not pre-registered). Only sub-industry distributions are taken from a table that machine-extracts inventory detail items (raw materials, work in progress, finished goods, merchandise, valuation allowance) from the notes to disclosed financial statements. No individual company is identified.
1. Sample
- Rows passing the consistency check (detail sum = total inventory ±10%): 105 · companies: 39.
- Rows by fiscal year: FY2015 4 · FY2016 4 · FY2017 4 · FY2018 2 · FY2019 2 · FY2022 3 · FY2023 17 · FY2024 34 · FY2025 35.
- Constraint noted by the original analysis: XBRL tagging of the inventory detail note became widespread from FY2023, so 81.9% of the rows in this table are FY2023 or later. With so few cross-sections, time-series tests are not yet possible.
- Groups with fewer than 5 companies are not shown (n<5 withheld). Published shares are rounded to 5 percentage points and days to 10 days, to prevent individual company values from being backed out.
2. Sub-industry distribution (medians)
| Sub-industry | Rows | Companies | Raw-material share | Raw-material share quartiles (Q1 to Q3) | Finished-goods (products + merchandise) share | Valuation allowance rate | Inventory days | Raw-material days | Finished-goods days | Gross margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Food products | 78 | 30 | about 30% | about 15% to about 40% | about 40% | under 5% | about 60 days | about 10 days | about 20 days | about 20% |
| Beverages | 10 | fewer than 5 | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld |
| Cosmetics | 17 | 6 | about 10% | under 5% to about 20% | about 90% | about 5% | about 70 days | under 10 days | about 60 days | about 50% |
Inventory days = inventory / cost of sales × 365; raw-material and finished-goods days use each item. All values are rounded bins.
3. Two business models within cosmetics
Even within one industry classification, the raw-material share splits companies into two groups. FY2025 cross-section, 10% raw-material share threshold (a descriptive threshold chosen inside the gap observed by the original analysis — exploratory):
| Type | Companies | Raw-material share (median) | Finished-goods share (median) | Gross margin (median) | Inventory days (median) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manufacturer (ODM, high raw-material share) | fewer than 5 | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld |
| Brand owner (low raw-material share) | fewer than 5 | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld | n<5 withheld |
Groups with fewer than 5 companies are not shown. That both groups exist on either side of the threshold is enough to show that putting both models in one cell mixes coordinates when valuations are compared by within-industry percentile (descriptive).
4. Exploratory correlations — not a signal claim
| Explanatory variable | Outcome variable | n | Rank correlation ρ | p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finished-goods share | Next-year change in gross margin | 67 | -0.31 | 0.010 |
| Raw-material share | Next-year change in gross margin | 67 | +0.29 | 0.019 |
| Raw-material growth | Next-year change in operating margin | 30 | -0.36 | 0.050 |
The original analysis ran 24 exploratory tests and 3 had p<0.05 — not far from what chance would produce. These remain directional hypotheses only; a test will be pre-registered once the next fiscal-year cross-section has accumulated.