Using Percent Change to Tell Your Business Story
Raw numbers only tell part of a business story. Often we frame the narrative of growth, decline, or transformation through a percent change, a method that helps stakeholders better understand the context of a business narrative. A percent change calculation is a simple mathematical formula, but it is vitally important tool for business storytelling.
The Power of Percent Change in Business Reporting
Expressing growth or decline through percent change vs a raw number, provides meaningful insight by showing the relative size of the change over time. Rather than simply stating that sales increased by $50,000 in a year, reporting a 25% increase this year provides crucial context about the significance of that growth.
This context is essential because a $1 million increase might seem impressive until you realize it represents only a 2% change for a massive corporation, while a $50,000 increase might represent extraordinary 25% growth for a small business. Percent change equalizes these differences, making performance comparable across different-sized companies, departments, or time periods.
A Real World Example
Companies large and small rely on percent change to communicate meaningful shifts in their business. Additionally, media focus on covering business and industries often rely on percent change to contextualize facts and figures. Consider this report from the Wall Street Journal about Apple's decline in the Chinese smartphone market.
The report uses percent change to discuss both a decrease in overall Chinese market share for Apple, and a growth in smartphone market share for Xiaomi. According to data from International Data Corporation (IDC), Apple's share of China's smartphone market shrank from 15.6% to 13.7% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2025, representing a 12.2% percent decrease in market share, a significant drop in little over a year.
The more eye-popping number, however, is Xiaomi's 40% increase in shipments during the same time period.
The percent decline and growth used in this WSJ story add vital context to this story, and provide depth (in an easy way) beyond simply using the hard numbers and figures.
How to Apply This to Your Business Reporting
To implement percent change in your own business reporting:
- Identify key metrics worth tracking over time (revenue, customer acquisition costs, profit margins)
- Calculate the percent change using the formula: (New Value - Original Value) / Original Value × 100
- Present these changes alongside raw numbers to provide both specific data and relative context
- Consider using visual aids like arrows, colors, or charts to make percent changes immediately understandable
- Compare percent changes across different business units to identify areas of strength and weakness