How Does Grey Diversion Actually Work?
A distributor books volume discounts and incentive slabs, sells a slice into his territory and quietly ships the rest to aggregators in other territories, or exports it. The product is genuine; the damage is real: authorized partners lose sales they invested in, price discipline collapses market-wide and warranty geography turns to chaos. Everyone suspects; nobody knows which partner. That is an evidence problem.
What Does the Audit Method Reveal?
Converging tests that isolate the leaker:
- Reconciliation: purchases versus billed sales versus claimed stock, diverters' books don't balance without fiction
- Absorption reality: can the territory plausibly consume the volumes? Field checks on secondary sales answer it
- Coded-stock tracing: batch and serial data from grey-market purchases identifies the shipping distributor directly
- Pricing forensics: grey price points reverse-engineer which discount slab is funding the diversion
- Incentive autopsy: which schemes made diversion profitable. The fix is often in your own scheme design
What Happens With the Findings?
Contractual consequences with confidence: termination or cure of the identified diverter, incentive redesign to remove the arbitrage and communicated enforcement that resets channel behaviour, partners watch what you do with proof. Garuda executes the grey-market purchases, tracing and audit file that make the action defensible.