A fictional regional pet insurance market
Market share slide drawn as a donut with five slices
A market share slide is honest when the slices add to the whole market and dishonest the moment a category is quietly left out. This one covers a fictional regional pet insurance market, with four named insurers and every remaining company folded into one slice that is labelled as such.
What is on the slide
- Headline
- Pet Insurance Share, with the framing line naming the measure as premiums written last financial year.
- Donut
- Five slices, each labelled on the chart: Coastal Pet Cover 31%, Bramble Pet 24%, Fetchwell 17%, Pawtrust 11%, other insurers 17%.
- Legend cards
- Coastal Pet Cover, vet direct billing, down 2 points on last year. Bramble Pet, up 3 points after the supermarket tie up. Fetchwell, online only, flat for three years. Pawtrust, breed specific cover, up 1 point.
- What is not on it
- No dollar values, no growth chart and no source line, because the slide is about proportion.
When this is the right slide
A donut is the right shape when there are five slices or fewer, when they sum to the whole market, and when the reader needs proportions rather than exact values.
What to swap it for
Metrics: Waffle Market Leader. Swap to the waffle when one share has to dominate the slide, because a hundred squares makes a leading position feel larger than a ring does.
What this slide shows
The headline reads Pet Insurance Share and the line under it says the measure is premiums written last financial year across four named insurers and the rest of the market. The donut fills the left of the canvas with five slices, each labelled on the chart with its name and its percentage: Coastal Pet Cover 31%, Bramble Pet 24%, Fetchwell 17%, Pawtrust 11% and other insurers 17%. The right of the canvas holds four cards, one per named insurer, each with the percentage repeated at display size, the company name and a single line of context. Coastal Pet Cover is down two points on last year, Bramble Pet is up three after a supermarket partnership, Fetchwell has been flat for three years and Pawtrust is up one point on breed specific cover. The cards take four shades from the theme so each one ties back to its wedge without a separate key. Every company on the slide is fictional, and no dollar figure appears anywhere, because share and size are different slides.
Who this slide is for and when to use it
Strategy reviews, competitive updates and the market section of an investor deck. The reader wants to know who holds the market and whether the order is changing, and a donut answers the first question instantly and the second only through the cards. That is the honest division of labour: proportion in the chart, movement in the words. The slide stops working in three cases. When shares are close together, say five companies between eighteen and twenty two percent, the eye cannot rank the wedges and a bar chart is better. When the market is fragmented, with a long tail of small players, the other slice swamps the named ones. And when the audience needs absolute size as well as share, the donut needs a companion slide carrying the dollars.
How to adapt it
First, change the measure in the framing line to whatever the market is actually counted in: premiums written here, units shipped for a manufacturer, seats sold for a software category. The chart stays the same and the argument changes completely. Second, hold the slice count at four or five and fold the tail into a named group. If other is bigger than your largest named player, the market is fragmented and the story is the fragmentation rather than the ranking. Third, use the cards for movement rather than for description. A card that says what a company sells is a waste of the only writing space on the slide; a card that says which direction it moved and why is the reason to build the slide at all. If a single share has to dominate, the waffle layout makes one position feel larger, and a horizontal bar chart is better when the ranking is close and exact values matter.
What makes this slide work
The slices sum to one hundred
31, 24, 17, 11 and 17 add to 100, and the fifth slice is named other insurers rather than being dropped. A donut that adds to 83% and calls itself market share is the most common dishonest chart in business decks, because the missing slice is always the one that would change the conclusion.
Every slice is labelled on the chart itself
Because this layout hides the legend strip, each slice carries its name and percentage next to it, so the reader never has to match a colour to a key. The four cards on the right then add the movement and the reason, which is information a donut cannot carry: vet direct billing, the supermarket tie up, an online only model.
Five slices, and the smallest is still readable
The narrowest wedge is 11%, which is about forty degrees and comfortably labelled. Below roughly five percent a wedge becomes a sliver that needs a leader line, and a donut with three slivers should have been a bar chart. Holding the count at five is what keeps this readable from the back of a room.
Questions people ask
How many slices can a market share donut hold?
Four or five, with the tail grouped. This slide uses five, the smallest being eleven percent, which is still large enough to label on the chart. Past five the wedges get too narrow to label without leader lines, and once you are drawing leader lines a horizontal bar chart will read faster and rank more clearly.
Is a donut or a pie better for market share?
A donut, mostly, because the hollow centre stops the reader trying to judge the area of a wedge and pushes them towards comparing arcs and reading labels. Both are weak at fine comparison. If two competitors are within a couple of points of each other, neither shape will show it, and a bar chart will.
Should the other category be included?
Always, and named. A share chart that omits the tail implies the named players are the whole market, which flatters whoever commissioned the slide. Here other insurers holds 17%, which is more than two of the named companies and changes how a reader thinks about the competitive picture. Leaving it out would have been the dishonest version.
Where do the percentages come from on a fictional example?
They are made up for the example and chosen so they sum to one hundred and stay internally consistent with the movement notes. In a real deck the same discipline applies: pick one measure, one period and one source, then check that the parts add to the whole before anyone else does it for you.
Can a donut show change over time?
Not on its own. A donut is a snapshot, which is why the movement lives in the cards as up three points or flat for three years. If change is the main story, use a line chart of share over time or a slope chart between two years, and keep the donut for the slide that establishes the current picture.
What happens to this chart in a PowerPoint export?
A donut is one of the chart kinds that maps to a native PowerPoint chart in the editable export, so it stays a chart object with its data rather than becoming a picture. The waffle is the exception among chart kinds and exports as an image, which is worth knowing if the file will be edited after it leaves.
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